


Honeytrap

by mad_martha



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Angst, Drama, Forced Marriage, Friendship, M/M, Romance, harryronbigbang2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-25
Updated: 2011-05-25
Packaged: 2017-10-19 19:09:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/204259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mad_martha/pseuds/mad_martha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A curse takes Auror Ron and Cursebreaker Harry by surprise, with life-changing results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honeytrap

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Harry/Ron Big Bang 2011. Diverges from canon before the Epilogue of Deathly Hallows. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such place as Bere Pomeroy; the village and castle of Berry Pomeroy, however, most certainly do exist, allegedly complete with disruptive ghosts.

**Prologue**

 

The alarms went off as Ron burst through the doors of the Janus Thickey Ward.  He was prepared for that; had in fact expected them to go off long before now.  Part of him, the professional Auror part, was disgusted at the lax security at St. Mungo's, but mostly he was relieved.  It increased his chances of getting them out of there without interference.

 

The nurse on night-watch poked her head out of the office door to see what was going on, and Ron Stunned her without hesitation.  So far there was no indication of anyone else, but it could only be minutes before Security arrived on the scene; he took a circular device out of his pocket and lobbed it casually down the passage behind him, and with a soft _thud_ the corridor began to fill with a thick grey fog.  The lights dimmed and even the sound of the alarms was muffled. 

 

Ron hexed the locks on the ward door open and advanced up the ward at a half-run.  He already knew the person he was looking for wouldn't be on the ward proper; 'special measures' had been taken against a patient deemed to be too magically powerful and strong-minded to be controlled by normal means.  Just the thought of this made Ron bristle with barely-controlled anger, but he managed to put it aside as he shouldered his way through another door at the end of the ward and into the secure area.

 

A male nurse popped out this time, almost colliding with Ron.  "I say, what's going on here?" he demanded, and his eyes widened as he took in Ron's Auror robe - and the cold fury in his blue eyes.  "You can't just come barging in here, you're not authorised - "

 

He was silenced by the wand pointed at his forehead.  "Here's my authority, arsewipe," Ron snarled. _"Stupefy!"_   The nurse hit the ground cold and he stepped over him, dismissing him from his mind.

 

There were six doors on little sub-corridor.  Ron had never seen this set of rooms before, but he no longer needed anyone to tell him where Harry was; he couldn't have located him more easily if they'd been tethered to each other with a rope.  He hexed the locks on the third door along and shoved it open.

 

It wasn't a room; it was a padded cell, with a tiny barred window high up on one wall and a pallet on the floor was its only furniture.

 

Harry was on already his feet.  Ron had expected this, but what he hadn't expected was that his friend would be barefoot and dressed in shapeless white scrubs, the tunic of which had long sleeves sewn shut over the ends of his hands to prevent him hurting himself.  Nor did he expect to find him blinking myopically - his glasses had been taken away - and holding onto the wall for balance.

 

"Harry mate, come on, we've got to go ..."

 

But Harry only continued to blink at him, his green eyes cloudy and unfocussed.  "Ron ..." he mumbled, and that single syllable was drawn-out and slurred.

 

"Merlin!"  Ron grabbed him by the shoulders, supporting him.  "What have those shits given you?"

 

Harry clutched at his arms and rested his forehead on Ron's chest.  Ron couldn't help but twitch a little, especially when he felt the most peculiar sensation ... as though something was being pulled out of him into his friend.  "Thought you'd left me behind," Harry said, and his voice was already steadier and clearer.

 

"Not likely!  Don't know that I could if I wanted to," Ron admitted, more than a little ruefully.  "But mate, if we're going to get out of here we have to go _now_ , before all hell breaks loose and we're caught.  Do you think you can do that?"

 

"Hm ..."  Harry nodded.  "Yes - think so.  Clothes?  Wand?"

 

"I've got your wand.  Clothes - hold still ..."  Ron leaned back, steadying Harry with one hand, and tapped the hateful tunic and baggy trousers with his wand.  They were promptly transfigured into a polo shirt and jeans.  "I'll have to find something I can turn into a pair of shoes.  Can you manage without your glasses for now?"

 

"I have them," a new voice said, and Ron whipped around, nearly tipping Harry over.

 

Anthony Goldstein stood in the doorway.  He was dressed in Healer's robes and he held his hands held up to show he was no threat; Harry's glasses were in one hand and a pair of trainers dangled by the laces from the other.  "Relax, Weasley, I'm here to help.  I was trying to think of a way to bust Harry out of here myself if you hadn't turned up."

 

"Yeah?  I'll relax when we're well out of here and he's safe."  Ron didn't lower his wand.  "I'm here because I have to be.  What's your excuse, Goldstein?"

 

"You _know_ that already."  Tony grimaced.  "Damned if I'm going to try explaining myself to you again."

 

"Tell me what you're planning or I stun you," Ron snapped.

 

"There's no time!  What do you _think_ I'm planning?  I can show you another route out, one Security won't think of straight away.  Here, Harry, put these on."

 

He tossed the trainers to Harry, who failed to catch them and had to stoop unsteadily to pick them up.  Ron kept his wand levelled on Tony the whole time, and tried not to be impatient as Harry fumbled the shoes onto his feet.

 

"It looks like you're recovering from the Pacifying Draught already," Tony remarked, "but I have an antidote in my pocket that Weasley can give you when you're out of the building.  Your glasses."

 

"Thanks," Harry said more strongly, and the spectacles made it onto his face without problems.

 

"Wand," Ron said, pulling it out of his sleeve and handing it over.  "Can you use it?  We have to go."

 

"I hope you have a plan," Tony said, looking worried.  "Weasley, you must know that everyone expects you to try something like this.  Merlin, they may even be expecting _me_ to try something.  I think I can get you out of the hospital, but they'll be waiting."

 

"I know what I'm doing.  Come on, Harry.  Where's this famous route out, Goldstein?"

 

"Turn left ..."  Tony reached around them and waved his own wand.  A narrow length of wall between two doors stretched itself out horizontally until there was enough room for another door to pop into existence.  "These stairs lead around the back of the building and exit into Fissick Alley.  There are three doors at the bottom - make sure you take the one straight ahead.  If you go left you'll end up in the laundry, and the one on the right goes to the mortuary."

 

"Right.  And while we're escaping, you'll be doing what?" Ron asked.

 

"Well, I - "

 _"Petrificus totalis."_   Harry caught Tony as he fell, and settled him very gently on the floor.  "I'm sorry, Tony.  I know you want to help, but we can't take the risk.  This way, they can't blame you for us escaping." 

 _"Stupefy,"_ Ron added, for good measure.  "Nice to see you're yourself again," he said to Harry.

 

"Not quite, but close enough," Harry replied.  "Are we taking Tony's route?"

 

The sound shouts in the distance made them look at each other sharply.

 

"Go!" Ron said, and he shoved Harry through the door.

 

 **1 week earlier ...**

 

Ron had a car, which was the first thing Harry noticed when his friend arrived to collect him from Charlie Weasley's flat.

 

"Does it fly?" he asked, interested, as he studied the racy red convertible.

 

"Nah!" Ron said cheerfully.  "It's an ordinary Muggle car – Hermione's dad helped me buy it.  It was fun learning to drive."

 

Harry eyed him warily.  "You _do_ have a licence, don't you?"

 

Ron gave him a patient look and flipped open the glove compartment, pulling out a sheaf of papers.  "Licence.  Tax, insurance, MOT certificate.  Complete service history.  Everything above board, except for a couple of anti-theft charms, and what kind of Auror would I be if I didn't include those?"

 

"I'm impressed."

 

"Thought you might be.  Here, give me your gear."  Ron heaved Harry's bag onto the back seat.  "Nothing cursed in there, is there?"

 

"Only my memoirs!"  This was a long-standing, if feeble joke between them.

 

"Ha ha!  I've got a tent in the boot, in case we get stuck for lodgings.  That okay with you?  It's pretty roomy."

 

"It's fine.  No harm to your brother, but after his flat anything would be better."  Harry shuddered.  "He's proud of the fact that he can sleep twelve people on the living room floor."

 

Ron chuckled.  "Yeah, he's a Weasley.  Gran always used to say that we were none of us born to live in bloody great mausoleums like the Malfoys used to."

 

Harry looked a little disturbed.  "Yeah, but Ron ... even _I_ think he's a slob."

 

"That's because you haven't spent a weekend with George in party mode.  Twelve on the floor is _nothing._ "

 

"And you're planning to marry Hermione?  God help you."

 

"Oh, I'm quite domesticated.  I do laundry and everything.  Hop in."

 

Harry climbed in the passenger side and watched as Ron started the car and expertly pulled out into the flow of traffic.  "So where are we going?" he asked.

 

"A little place in South Devon called Bere Pomeroy.  Not _Berry_ Pomeroy, that's a village with an abandoned castle with a couple of dodgy ghosts the Ministry has to go and have a word with now and again.  This place isn't far from there, though.  Used to be a village there, one of those mixed Muggle and magical places, like Godric's Hollow, but it's been derelict for over a hundred years."

 

"And why are we going there?"

 

"You know I've been on cold cases for a while?" 

 

Harry nodded.  Ron had sustained an injury a few months back that necessitated light duties for a space.  Cold cases usually involved troublesome ghosts, unlikely prophesies and such - things which had been investigated before but where the original investigating Auror reached few or no conclusions.  Some of the files had been open for centuries.  Harry was familiar with the practice of setting a recuperating Auror to work on them; it was the best way of keeping someone as active as Ron out of mischief, while ensuring that he was still doing something useful.  The Cursebreakers did something similar.

 

"I found this file about mysterious disappearances at Bere Pomeroy going back about six centuries.  There's a really old wizard house there, pretty much derelict, and according to previous investigators it's curse-free, but every so often someone goes inside and doesn't come out.  Then people go looking for them and find a big splash of blood on the walls.  It's only happened about a dozen times in six hundred years, but the last occasion was a few years ago and the Muggle authorities got really excited about it."  Ron glanced at Harry.  "The file's under your seat – go ahead, take a look.  The Muggles have loads of files on it too, they send those sintecists – "

 

"Scientists," Harry corrected him absently, flicking through the file.

 

" – Scientists to investigate it.  They haven't found anything though, and neither have we so far."

 

Harry raised a brow at him.  "So what makes you think we will?"

 

Ron grinned.  "I don't reckon so.  But it's nice weather for a drive, don't you think?"

 

Harry grinned back at him.  "Are we even going to go look at this place?"

 

"Well, of course!" Ron looked affronted.  "You don't think I'd waste Auror time on a road-trip with my old mate Harry Potter and _not_ look at the nasty, jinxed old building, do you?  I've listed you as an independent consultant, by the way."

 

"It has a nice, formal ring to it."

 

"Yeah, I thought so.  We'll poke our noses in one afternoon, formally declare it curse-free for the records – once again – and toddle virtuously on our way."

 

"To the nearest pub, I suppose!  Does Hermione know what you're up to this week?"

 

Ron's grin was just a little bit guilty.  "I reckon what she doesn't know about, she can't hex my balls off for.  Not like she's going to complain about me taking a trip with you anyway, is it?"

 

Harry thought it was more likely she would be disappointed not to be included, although she would never say so.  He decided they would have to think of a way to make it up to her when she inevitably found out - if she didn't already know, and that wouldn't have surprised him either.  He turned his attention back to the file and was mildly surprised to see the crest of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary on a lot of the paperwork.

 

"Ron, is this a copy of the Muggle police file?"

 

"Yeah, Kingsley has a contact who makes copies of stuff like this for us.  It's dead useful, but you practically have to run a translation charm over some of their forensic reports.  Why can't they talk in English?"

 

Harry was looking at one of the Auror forensic reports, which was liberally sprinkled with everything from runes to commentary in colloquial Gobbledegook.  "I'm sure they'd say the same thing about ours," he said wryly.  "It doesn't look like they've closed this file - are we likely to run into the police if we go poking around?"

 

"Doubt it.  And if we do, they'll probably just think we're walking our dog.  There's a note in their file about it being a popular place for dogging."

 

"Er ..."  Harry managed to swallow the laugh that wanted to explode out of his chest.  When he flicked through the file, there was indeed a note made by a local police constable about "the prevalence of dogging" in the general area of Bere Pomeroy.  "Ron - dogging isn't the same thing as dog- _walking_."

 

"Eh?"

 

"It's ... No, you know what?  I'm going to wait until you've parked up somewhere to explain that one."

 

"Why?"

 

"Just drive," Harry said, grinning.

 

~~~

 

They arrived in Totnes in the early evening, at which point Ron pulled into a lay-by and dug out a map, which he studied while they refreshed themselves with chocolate bars and juice bought at a service station.

 

"Reckon you can navigate?" he asked Harry finally.  "I don't think we're more than five miles away, but once we get off the - " he squinted at the map, "A385, it's all fields and small lanes.  Or we could back up and take the A381, but we'll still have to leave it before we get to Littlehempston.  I think.  Cripes, why don't Muggles give the roads proper names?"

 

Harry took the map from him and studied it.  "I can't even see Bere Pomeroy on here," he said after a while.

 

"I know, I think the map's too new.  See if there's a better one on the file."

 

Harry flicked through the files until he came across an old wizard map, which, on the face of things, wasn't much better.  But he had a better chance of interpreting the wizard map; one of the useful skills he'd picked up as a Cursebreaker.  "Okay, this makes more sense - if you match it up to the new map, I think we need to leave the A385 _here -_ " he tapped a point on the Muggle map, "then drive until we can see this tree."  He pointed to a large tree on the wizard map marked _Hanging Oak._  "And then we can use a Point-Me Charm, according to this."

 

"You got all that from that crappy map?" Ron said, perplexed.

 

"You should see some of the maps I've used in the Caribbean and Central America."

 

"X marks the spot?"

 

Harry laughed.  "Not far off, mate!"

 

"Great!  Let's get moving."  Ron twisted the keys in the ignition.  "I reckon we'll have to camp tonight, you sure you're okay with that?"

 

Harry gave him a quizzical look.  "Why wouldn't I be?  It's not the first time I've shared a tent with you."

 

Ron shrugged.  "Just thought I'd ask.  It's one of the smaller tents."

 

"So long as we don't have to share a sleeping bag, I think I'll be okay."

 

"But what if I get scared in the night?"

 

"What do you expect me to do about it if you do?"

 

Ron laughed and let out the clutch.

 

~~~

 

Bere Pomeroy was exactly as Ron had described it: a derelict village, most of what was left being the bare roofless walls of small farm buildings.  Some of them had clearly been scavenged for building materials or turned into crude shelters for stock and equipment belonging to other farmers from further afield.  Others were in slightly better condition but had been ruthlessly ignored, and they could feel the traces of old magical wards that discouraged Muggles from trespassing long after the original owners had departed.

 

And then there was Pomerai Lodge.  It was a strange little manor house set on what had probably once been the outskirts of the village, back when the village was still viable.  It was surrounded by a high stone wall topped with worn cock-and-hen coping and set in fairly spacious gardens; the building itself was also of stone, a squat mediaeval house no more than two storeys high, with a low but wide central door and a series of long narrow windows set on either side at the front, like an elderly church. 

 

Harry wouldn't have believed it could be in such good condition and yet go unnoticed if it hadn't been for the fact that he and Ron were nearly on top of it before they saw it themselves.  The Hanging Oak of the wizard map was deceptive; no sooner had they stopped beneath it and cast the Point-Me Charm than the building's front gates shimmered into existence barely a hundred yards from where they were parked.

 

"Bloody hell!" Ron said, when they both recovered enough to speak.

 

"I take it you weren't expecting this?" Harry said, a little less dryly than he might have done under other circumstances.  Damn - if it hadn't been for the badly overgrown pathway to the front door and garden that clearly hadn't been tended in an era or so, he would have thought the house still inhabited.

 

"You've seen the file.  It's supposed to be derelict!  What total pillock missed that it was still standing with all its windows and roof intact?"

 

"Creepy," Harry remarked.  "Well, what do you think?  I can feel its wards from here, so we'd probably be better parking up and camping inside the grounds, even if we don't go inside the house tonight.  Want me to get the gates open and clear the path a bit, so you can drive in?"

 

"Yeah, might as well."

 

Harry climbed out of the car and approached the gates cautiously.  It was unwise to be too brash where magical properties were concerned, and this one already had form if the accounts on file were any indication.

 

The gate was chained shut, and it didn't take a wizard to see that the chains were of a more recent date than the property itself.  Harry brushed his fingers over them cautiously and received a gentle magical whisper of information from the chains in return.  Auror wards.  Well, that was no surprise; the last investigator had been an Auror some thirty years previously, according to the files.  The Ministry had secured the house and grounds during the first war, mostly to ensure that it couldn't be used as a base by Death Eaters - or, worse, used by innocent parties who then ended up as a splash of gore on the walls.

 

For some reason, Ron's blithe assurances that this was a once in a blue moon event with no logical pattern or discernible cause were no longer reassuring Harry, but he told himself he was being irrational.  It was just a creepy, abandoned wizard house, and Merlin knew they'd seen enough of those over the years; wizard houses were notorious for being a bit odd if they were left uninhabited for too long.  And they were an Auror and a Cursebreaker.  If they couldn't figure out any suspicious magic in or around this house, then who could?

 

Harry pulled his wand out of his sleeve and tapped the chains with it, and with a soft ripple of fading magic they fell away.  He had to force the gates open against the rampaging weeds and use some fairly powerful hexes to clear the broad path that led up to the front door, but at least it was possible to see where the paths were and the foliage attempting to scale the walls of the house was nothing more than ivy.  It was, however, evident to Harry, both visibly and magically, that he was not the first person to clear a path through what was otherwise a low-level jungle.  Someone before him had used strong magic in a recognisable pattern around the building, strong enough to discourage the vegetation from re-encroaching for quite some time.

 

Ron drove the car inside the gates slowly and carefully.  "What do you think we should do?" he asked Harry, pausing with the engine idling.

 

"At least come far enough inside to close the gates, and if it's possible I think we should park out of sight of them," Harry replied.  "I don't suppose Muggles can see this place at all, whether the gates are shut or not, but if any magical folk pass by it's probably better if there's nothing to attract their attention."

 

"We're not doing anything we shouldn't," Ron pointed out.

 

"No, but …"  Harry paused and scratched his nose, thinking.  "It's just a habit," he said finally.  "When I'm out on a job, it's standard procedure not to get civilians involved because they don't know what they're doing and could set off a trap or something unintentionally.  And you know, most witches and wizards are pretty nosy.  They can't resist sticking their wands into things they don't understand."

 

Ron had to acknowledge that this was very true, and often the bane of an Auror's life when he was investigating.  It seemed to be a cultural trait in the magical community, this sometimes fatal inability to leave things alone.  His own father spent vast amounts of his spare time fiddling with Muggle electrical parts which, seeing as wizards didn't use electricity, was at least reasonably harmless.  But Ron could think of a score of deadly incidents where someone hadn't been able to resist poking a curse or an enchanted object just to see what would happen.  The last thing they needed as they investigated a potentially jinxed house was to have some bright soul drop by and offer to "help".

 

"Okay, I'll park around the side of the house – if I can drive that far.  Hopefully there'll be somewhere we can stick the tent up.  Can you hex the weeds a bit more?"

 

It took the better part of an hour, but eventually they were settled in around the side of the house in a spot that overlooked the remains of what had probably once been a very neat little pear orchard.  Not anymore, though; the trees were all dead and their skeletons added a certain ambiance as dusk fell.

 

"Nice place," Ron commented, as they set up a camping stove and began to make dinner.

 

"You know how to show your mates a good time," Harry needled him good-humouredly.  "This is right up there with the time I had to sleep in a room full of the remains of Carthaginian child sacrifices."

 

"Yeah, can you hold off telling me any more about that until we're out of here tomorrow and set up in a nice little B&B?"

 

Harry chuckled.  "Have you got a saucepan or jerrycan to put these baked beans in?"

 

The tent was very similar to the one they'd used during their year hunting horcruxes, complete with bunk beds; they flipped a coin to decide who got the top bunk.  Fortunately the canvas walls and dim nightlight Ron left alight helped to tone down the Hallowe'en effects of the house and garden outside. 

 

All the same, it was hard to settle into sleep.

 

"Are you asleep?" Ron asked finally.

 

Harry rolled his eyes at the canvas roof above him.  "Yes, of course."

 

Ron snorted.  "Prat!"

 

"No, you may not share my sleeping bag.  It was your idea to come here, you're just going to have to live with this place giving you the willies."

 

"I can poke you through the bottom of your bunk, you know!"

 

"Kinky!" Harry drawled.  "Does Hermione know you poke other blokes in their bunks when she's not around?"

 

"Oy!"

 

"I'll have to bring it up as a just cause or impediment at your wedding ..."  He laughed at Ron's colourful response.  "When are you two getting married anyway?"

 

"Not yet," was Ron's comfortable reply.  "I'm not ready to settle down, and she hasn't achieved social justice for all yet, so ... we're not getting married for a while."  He paused.  "Anyway, what's it to you?  You desperate to play Best Man or something?"

 

"Hey, far be it from me to interfere!  I've got nothing against living in sin - I like a nice little bit of sin myself."

 

"Is that why you split up with my sister?" Ron asked dryly.

 

Harry blinked.  "Eh?"

 

"You heard me."

 

"Oh please!  You're not going to start on that again are you?  It was amicable - you know it was!  She wanted to go her own way as much as I did."

 

"I didn't see you fighting it too hard."

 

"What part of "we both wanted it" do you not get?" Harry demanded.  When there was no immediate response from Ron, he rolled over and hung his head over the side of his bunk.  Ron had his arms folded across his chest and an uncompromising expression on his face that was only too familiar to Harry.  "Did you also miss the part where she hitched up with one of the Beaters from the Montrose Magpies a couple of weeks after we split up?"

 

"Are you calling my sister a tart?" Ron demanded.

 

"What the hell?  No!  I _am_ calling you a fat-headed git though," Harry retorted, exasperated.  "If you're going to start pulling this crap again, I'm off!  What business of yours is it anyway?  You've got your happy little relationship!  Why do you have to interfere with the rest of us?"

 

"My sister - "

 

"Why aren't you having this conversation with her?"  Ron spluttered, and Harry pressed his advantage.  "Probably because you know she'd hex your bollocks off for being a nosy, interfering git!  Well I'm warning you, if you don't get over it I'll be doing the same thing!"

 

"I wasn't - "Ron began.

 

"Yes, you were," Harry interrupted sharply.  "For the last time, Ron - Ginny wanted to move on.  We had a civilised conversation about it - like adults, but I realise that's an alien concept to _you_ \- and I agreed.  We are still friends, but she has her life and I have mine.  End of conversation.  Good night."

 

And he flicked his wand at the nightlight, putting it out.

 

It was some time before either of them managed to go to sleep, though.

 

~~~

 

If there was some stiffness or constraint between them when Ron emerged from the tent at breakfast, it soon faded under Harry's determined flow of cheerful small talk.  Harry had known Ron too long to allow a spat like the one they'd had in the night to affect him.  They weren't children anymore, after all.  Ron was still capable of sulking after a fight if he was allowed to, but Harry preferred to put it behind him.  Opinions had been voiced and refuted; that was the end of the matter as far as he was concerned.

 

Until the next time, he thought ruefully as he dished up some porridge and passed the bowl to his friend.  Hermione sometimes said, with affectionate exasperation, that nothing short of a Bludger would knock certain ideas out of Ron's head, and if you didn't have a Bludger handy then you just had to keep repeating yourself until the pair of you were sick of the noise.

 

"Okay," he said, when they'd both consumed enough porridge and tea to wake them up properly.  "How do you want to tackle this house?"

 

"Write up a fake report and get the hell out of here," Ron said.  At Harry's amused raised eyebrow, he shrugged.  "That's what the last Auror to come here did, I reckon."

 

"We'd feel a bit stupid if we did that," Harry said.  "I mean, we're here now and we just spent a night jumping at every fox barking.  We might as well give ourselves a proper scare before we go.  Besides, someone obviously wasn't reporting properly or they'd have said something about the house being in fresh and frisky nick."

 

"You really have spent too long with Bill if you can call a place like this _fresh and frisky_ ," Ron commented.  He scraped the last drops of porridge out his bowl and set it to one side.  "Okay.  I don't want to spend more than a morning on this if I can help it, so let's just go in - carefully - have a poke about, then leave.  Sound good?"

 

"Suits me.  You have somewhere in mind for lunch?"

 

Ron gave him a small grin.  "Anywhere but here!"

 

"Fair enough!"

 

In the spirit of this, they packed up the tent and put it back in the car.  Then they walked around to the front of the house, checking windows as they passed them.  The majority were shuttered or boarded over on the inside, and those that weren't were so dirty as to make it impossible to see inside.

 

"How's the door fastened, do you know?" Harry asked, as they approached the set of shallow steps up to the double front door.

 

"Just locked, I think."

 

"I'll run Reveal Charms on this side, if you do other.  I'd better check the steps first, though."

 

"Do you see much in the way of hexed steps?" Ron asked, interested, as Harry began sketching complex runes in the air above the first step with his wand.

 

"Yeah, you'd be surprised.  Top step, bottom step, hexes that trigger if you tread on the left side of the step but not the right, ones that trigger if your whole foot isn't on the stair, ones that are triggered by weight or height - you name it.  Bill found one that was triggered by perfume last year."

 

"What's the point of that?"

 

"It was the crypt in an old church.  The priests probably didn't want women going in there.  Or anyone else who wore perfume."

 

"So what was in there that was worth hexing?"

 

"Beside a bunch of dead priests?  A stack of gold plate and coins in a big chest under one of the tombs.  I haven't seen that much gold since we broke into Bellatrix Lestrange's vault at Gringotts."  Harry straightened up.  "I can't see anything wrong with the steps.  Let's try the doors."

 

The level of caution Harry insisted upon frustrated Ron a little and made him wonder, privately, what had knocked his friend's more reckless streak.  They had always leapt before they looked when they were younger, and to a certain extent this was a trait Ron still needed; too much caution was as dangerous as not enough in an Auror.  He understood that Cursebreakers by the very nature of their job needed to exercise more care, but this was ... pernickety.

 

"There's such a thing as being over-cautious you know," he remarked finally, trying to keep his tone light.

 

"Let's see if you're still saying that when we end up in an oubliette," Harry retorted, but he seemed to take the point and waved his wand to unlock the doors.

 

The lock seemed to take forever to respond, but eventually the tumblers clanked rustily and there was the heavy sound of bolts shooting back on the other side of the doors.  Ron had to give the right-hand door a fairly hefty shove with his shoulder to persuade it to swing open; it was solid and resistant, although some of that could be put down to the rust on the enormous hinges.

 

"Solid oak," Harry commented.  " _Really_ solid - look at that, it must be eight inches thick!  Whew, lovely smell ..."

 

A waft of mustiness, dry rot and old dust billowed out, warm and dry thanks to the summer heat, and tinged with something faintly metallic.

 

"Tell me that isn't blood," Ron said uneasily.  "This place has been shut up for decades, right?  It can't be blood."

 

"It can," Harry said, rather calmer than Ron would have expected under the circumstances.  "I've run into this in South America.  Someone's warded this place with a preservation charm at some point and it's left a kind of magical 'smell' of the blood fixed into the stonework.  Stones have memories, you know that, right?  It's a memory of the smell, not the smell itself.  All the same ..."  He made a face.  "Merlin, the walls must have been drenched in it for the blood to fix this much. How many people were killed here?"

 

"Less than a dozen, I think."

 

" _Less than_ \- and the Aurors never worked out what did it?  Shit."

 

"Hey, sometimes it happens," Ron said defensively.  "You do your best, but the killer still gets away.  Like Jack the Ripper."

 

"He wasn't a wizard, was he?" Harry asked, diverted.

 

"God knows.  Someone with magic messed with the crime scenes, but if you look at the records it could just as easily have been one of the MLEs cocking up as usual, not the killer at all.  They took a look at the Ripper murders for some reason."

 

There was a pause.  They looked at each other.

 

"Why aren't we going inside?" Ron asked finally.

 

"Jack the Ripper," Harry said, and he grinned.

 

Ron snorted.  "If he did this, then he got about a bit!  _And_ he discovered the secret of eternal life ... forget I said that last bit."

 

"You know, that would be the rational explanation," Harry said, "and that bothers me a bit.  If you could pin it down to one person, coming back here over and over, it would explain a lot.  But I just - I really don't need another horcrux mystery in my life."

 

"Doesn't have to be a horcrux," Ron said hastily.  "Could be someone with a philosopher's stone or a stash of unicorn blood."

 

"Or a Time-Turner.  That's a nasty thought - a time-travelling serial killer."

 

"Ah!  I'm happy to say I can disprove that idea," Ron said.

 

Harry stared.  "How?"

 

"I've counted them all," Ron said wryly.

 

"I expect you're going to explain that."

 

"Little job I did at the beginning of the year.  The Ministry keeps a very strict eye on all Time-Turners in the British Isles, and the International Confederation of Wizards made it illegal to manufacture new ones about a hundred years ago.  The Aurors spring random checks on everyone who has them to make sure they're all accounted for and properly secured, and this year I did the inspection."  Ron ticked them off on his fingers.  "There are eighteen in the Department of Mysteries, six of which allegedly no longer work.  There's three on display at the Chronos Institute in Belfast - they're sealed in crystal, you'd have to blast it to get them out.  There's an old experimental century-jumping model at the Dillweed Observatory, but it only works for five minutes once every ninety-two years, and no one knows exactly when it activates.  And there are nine in various vaults at Gringotts, I had to get a Ministry warrant to find out if the vaults had been accessed since the last inspection - "

 

"Had they?"

 

"No.  And finally, there's one at Hogwarts, under lock and charm in the Headmistress's office.  That's the one Hermione used when we were at school."

 

"You realise that doesn't mean someone _doesn't_ have access to a working Time-Turner?" Harry pointed out.  "It only makes it less likely."

 

Ron rolled his eyes.  "You realise we've just successfully procrastinated again?  Come on, let's just go in and see what we're dealing with."

 

He gave the door another shove and it reluctantly swung open, allowing a narrow rectangle of sunlight to illuminate the entrance hall behind it.  Mostly what the two of them could see through the doorway was a bare dusty stone floor and smooth stone walls.

 

"Just a precaution," Harry said, "but let's make sure the door can't shut behind us, okay?  I got caught out that way in a pyramid in Yucatan last year.  It couldn't be opened from the inside."

 

His tone was uneasy enough to make Ron agree without hesitation.  "I'll grab one of those big rocks from the side of the path and prop it open."

 

That done, they advanced over the threshold warily.

 

Nothing leapt out of the shadows to attack them, but the house was still unsettlingly well preserved considering its history.  There was no furniture or decoration, only bare walls and floors; it hadn't been lived in for centuries.  And yet it _should_ have been a tumbledown forgotten skeleton of a house by now – and it wasn't.  It was cool, dry and structurally sound.  Sweep away the dust and cobwebs, and it was ready to receive a new set of occupants along with all their possessions.  Always supposing they didn't mind the subliminal stench of blood that oozed out of the stonework.

 

"Who does this house belong to?" Harry asked, breaking a nervous silence.

 

"No idea.  The Ministry has responsibility for it these days, but there are no title deeds anywhere in the files."  Ron shrugged.  "I suppose the title still belongs to the original owner's family, whoever they are."

 

"Whatever happened here has made it uninhabitable," Harry said.  "There's a curse on it now, no matter what caused all those people to die.  Not even a ghost would haunt it."

 

"You feel that too, eh?"  Ron's lips tightened a little at Harry's nod.  "We definitely need to be out of here before dark then.  If it even lets us stay that long."  The 'oddness' of wizard houses sometimes manifested as a kind of personality, which had a lot to do with the types of magic that had been practiced within the structure's walls.  It took no genius at all to recognise that the personality of this one would be negative.

 

"I'm more concerned that it might not want us to leave."  Harry sighed then and straightened his shoulders.  "Okay, let's just go straight for the source.  According to those files all the deaths occurred in the master bedroom at the top of the stairs, so I vote we go up and take a look."

 

"Okay.  And provided neither of us finds any hexes or curses, we leave."

 

"And if we find any?"

 

"We leave," Ron said, and he gave Harry a wry smile.  "This place gives me the heebie-jeebies, mate.  If we find anything suspicious, I'm out of here and owling Kingsley to send in reinforcements!"

 

Harry nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching into a half-grin.  "Suits me!"

 

Having a firm plan of action helped.  They advanced across the narrow hallway towards the stone staircase opposite the doors.  Dust shifted lazily around their feet and a few cobwebs that had the temerity to hang from ancient iron torch-brackets blew back and forth as the air moved.

 

The impression of blood was stronger on the staircase, despite the stairs themselves being unmarked.

 

"The files say most of the blood was in the bedroom," Ron said as calmly as he could manage.  The increasing 'smell' was quite unsettling psychologically; worse in some ways for not being physically present in any way.

 

"At a guess, whatever killed those people was in the room, but some of them lived long enough to try and escape," Harry speculated.  "They must have been bleeding heavily and tracked it all down the stairs."

 

"I can think of a couple of curses that could do damage like that, but – it doesn't make sense, Harry!"

 

"Not without knowing why the killer did it," Harry agreed.  "All the ones I can think of are deliberately sacrificial in nature.  The aim is to make the victim bleed out in some way."

 

"Human sacrifice has been really rare in Europe since the Romans left," Ron said.  "Offhand, I can't think of one British Dark wizard or witch known to have used it – not even You-Know-Who or Grindelwald when they were raising Inferi.  It's too risky.  Animal sacrifice is safer, and does the job just as well nine times out of ten."

 

"The killer must have decided this was the tenth time, then," Harry said.  "And maybe the risk was what got him.  Always supposing that's what happened to him.  That's the thing with human sacrifice, after all – if you lose control of your victim, you can end up paying for it yourself."

 

They reached the top of the stairs.  At this point neither of them really needed to recall the floor plans of Pomerai Lodge to know where the master bedroom was.  The psychic miasma of blood was enough to lead them to it.  The door bore a yellowing Ministry notice stating that the room had been examined thaumaturgically on such-and-such a date by such-and-such an Auror and declared safe – when Harry lifted up the end of the parchment, a couple more such notices, both much older, were still pinned underneath it.

 

"I hope you brought your own copy of this," he said to Ron humorously.

 

"Is the door warded?" Ron asked, disregarding this frivolity.  He had his knuckles pressed to his nose in a futile attempt to fend off the blood-reek, which had reached the level of week-old slaughterhouse.

 

"Only the standard "we woz 'ere" Auror wards."  Harry dismissed them with a flick of his wand.  "Okay, here goes -  _Alohomora!_ "

 

The door swung open.

 

"Merlin!"  Ron gave up and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, pressing it over his nose and mouth.  "Do you think the Muggles can smell this?"

 

"No, but there was a note in one of the police files about witnesses claiming to be completely freaked out in this room.  No wonder!"  Harry stepped across the threshold warily, wand extended, and relaxed a little when nothing happened.  He ran a quick Reveal Charm which came up negative.  "I think we're safe.  Come and take a look!  This must be the only furniture left in the house."

 

There was an immense four poster bed in the middle of the room, the wooden frame blackened with age and the merest shreds of curtains still hanging.  The mattress and other covers were long gone.  Apart from that, and a rug worn to the weft that lay in front of the empty fireplace, the room was empty.

 

Ron peered around the edge of the door without stepping inside.  "Do I have to?" he asked indistinctly.  "Mate, how can you just _stand_ there?  I'm about to woof my breakfast!"

 

"I'm used to it, remember?  The Mayans loved a bit of human sacrifice and all their temples stink like this."  Harry paused.  "It's pretty strong for the number of deaths, though.  Makes me wonder if there's some kind of Fear Hex operating that's magnifying it.  And there are some carvings over the fireplace - come and take a shifty."

 

Ron grimaced, but put his handkerchief away and stepped through the door.

 

With an audible _snap_ , the curse triggered.

 

~~~

 

"No!" Harry shouted and he lunged at Ron, grabbing him just before he could hurl himself back through the doorway.  The door slammed shut, and Ron let out a furious yell.

 

"What did you do that for, you pillock?  Now we're both stuck in here!"

 

"It's a fucking trap-spell!  You could have stepped out of that door and ended up as a bloody great splat of blood, like the other people caught in it!"

 

"You don't know that!"  But Ron was already relaxing in his grip, as aware as Harry of the truth in this.  A trap-spell's function, after all, was to act as a _trap_ and to try to escape it could be anything from futile to fatal.  "Bloody hell!  Why didn't it trigger when you walked in?"

 

"Just a guess, but I'd say it wanted both of us.  Shit shit shit!  I wondered if there was something I missed in those witness accounts - every time the deaths happened, there were two people involved!  Fuck, why didn't I see the pattern?"

 

"Don't beat yourself up over it," Ron said quickly, hearing the horrified note in Harry's voice.  "It's not like anyone else noticed in a few hundred years, is it?  Enough bloody investigators have been in and out of here.  If this is anyone's fault, it's mine, for bringing you here in the first place!  I must have been off my head for even suggesting it."

 

"Ron - "

 

"Come on, this is _us_ ," Ron interrupted, trying to inject a note of humour into the situation.  "It was bound to go Quaffle-shaped, wasn't it?  A hex that only triggers once in a blue moon?  Asking for trouble!"

 

Harry relaxed a little too, releasing him.  "Yeah, maybe.  All the same - no, forget that.  Let's concentrate on working out how to get out of here."

 

"Merlin, where do we start?"  Ron looked around and blinked.  "Er - Harry ..."

 

"Yeah, I know."

 

The charnel-house 'smell' was gone and so was the grim bareness of the room.  Even as they watched a visible ripple seemed to run across the walls, replacing bare stone with elegant hangings, and the bed, although still dark and heavy, was now highly polished, draped in fresh hangings and made up with a deep mattress, pillows, fine sheets and velvet covers.  The rug on the floor was thick and richly woven in intricate designs, and with a soft puff of air a fire sprang up in the fireplace.

 

Ron had to swallow a couple of times before he could speak.  "Not creepy at all, eh?"

 

"It's an illusion," Harry said, staring.  He reached out to touch one of the thick wall hangings.  It was solid and real and moved a little under his fingertips.  "A bloody good illusion," he amended.

 

"An illusion that traps us in a bedroom and decorates it like the honeymoon suite at a five star hotel.  Hoo-boy."

 

"Let's start with the carvings on the fireplace," Harry suggested.  He was secretly rather relieved that Ron was taking this well enough to try and joke, however weakly.  He was feeling panicky enough that one of them becoming hysterical would probably set off the other.

 

"Right - carvings.  I'm starting to wonder if any of the previous investigators actually bothered to come inside the house," Ron commented as he followed Harry over to the fireplace.  "I don't remember anything about carvings in the files, and it's something I'd make a note of if it was me looking into these deaths.  Did you read anything about them?"

 

"No, but I wasn't trying to memorise the files.  Have you got them with you?"

 

Ron's ears turned rather pink.  "Er - no.  I didn't think we'd need them."

 

Harry rolled his eyes.  "Oh well," he said, suppressing the urge to make a snarky remark.  He didn't want to start a row with Ron in their current predicament.  "At least we still have our wands.  What do you make of this?"

 

Ron stared blankly at the stone surround of the fireplace for a moment or two.  "Yeah," he said finally.  "And how did anyone miss this lot?"

 

The fireplace was surrounded by a protruding ledge of stone, not quite deep enough to be called a mantelpiece.  It was flat and squared off, and the surface had been carved with runes or symbols of some kind.

 

"You've got to wonder how it went unnoticed, haven't you," Harry commented.

 

"Mate, I don't have the first clue here - it's not my area of expertise.  What do _you_ make of it?  Is it a curse?  Is this the trap spell?"

 

"I don't know."  Harry stepped up to the fireplace and peered at the symbols closely, although he was careful not to touch them.  "I'd be amazed if they weren't involved somehow, but it's nothing I recognise and I can't feel any energy around them.  They could just be put here to make us _think_ they're the curse, while the real spell is somewhere else."

 

"Great.  Brilliant.  So what do we do now?"

 

Harry hesitated, then said, "Well if this was anywhere else, I'd say we need to map out the edges of the trap first and see what we're working with - how far around the room it extends.  Then we need to find the trigger point.  And it'd be good to work out which is the illusion - what we're seeing now or what we were seeing before …"  He looked around, then shrugged and grabbed the end of one of the bed curtains.  There was gold fringing all along the edges, and Harry ripped a small section of it off.  Laying this flat on his palm, he flicked his wand at it.  The fringing disappeared in a weird shimmy of air.  "That answers that.  This is the illusion."

 

"Right."  Ron squared his shoulders.  "Let's start mapping the trap."

 

It took over an hour, but when they were done the walls, floor and ceiling were crisscrossed with glowing lines and equations, all drawn in the air with their wands.  Drained, Ron slumped onto the end of the bed, but Harry remained on his knees by the rug, poking some of the equations into new formulae, his eyes tracking over the net of spells worriedly.

 

"What have we got?" Ron asked, when it seemed like Harry had almost forgotten he was there.

 

Harry sat back on his heels and ran his free hand over hair that was already standing up in peaks.  "The trap covers the inside the room and seals off all possible exits, including the fireplace.  There are two triggers, one under that stone flag in front of the door - it's not really stone, there's a flat panel of ebony laid between the floorboards and it's charmed to match its background.  The other one is this rug, the trigger's woven into the warp threads."

 

"That's a bit complicated, isn't it?" Ron said, frowning.

 

"It's _insanely_ complicated.  As far as I can tell, the carvings on the fireplace are nothing, they're just decoration to get the attention of the first person into the room, because then you have to tread on the rug to get a good look at them."  Harry grimaced, his eyes still flicking over the combinations of runes hanging in ghostly clusters in the air.  "By stepping on the rug you stand a fifty-fifty chance of arming the second trigger."

 

"Fifty-fifty?"

 

"It depends on the person who steps on the second trigger, but it doesn't make sense because …"  Harry's voice trailed off as he traced one line of the net, following it with his wand until it disappeared under the bed.  He got down on his hands and knees again and pointed his wand under the bed, muttering a charm.  A new glowing line appeared, circular and wreathed in angular cuneiform-like symbols.

 

After a moment, Harry scrambled back out again, shaking his head.  "No.  That doesn't make sense, dammit!"

 

"What is it?"  Ron craned his neck to look at the circle.  "Hey, I've seen something like that in one of Hermione's books!  It's a Circle of Ishtar, isn't it?"

 

"Yeah," Harry said flatly.

 

"Whoa - sex magic?  Bloody hell!"  Ron blinked and looked around the room.  "Although not exactly out of keeping, if you get my drift.  Explains a lot."

 

"It doesn't explain the triggers."  Harry got up and went to crouch in front of the stone flag by the door.  He flicked his wand over it a couple of times, but the symbols hanging in the air above it didn't change.

 

"I can't offer any opinions if you don't tell me what the problem is," Ron said reasonably.

 

"It's a Circle of Ishtar, Ron.  What was Ishtar the goddess of?"

 

"Er … fertility and war?"

 

"And love and sex.  And where's the Circle?"

 

"Under the bed."  Ron sighed.  "I'm not dense, Harry, I get that part.  It's a honey-trap, hence the bed and the nice fire, etcetera etcetera.  Two people walk through the door and get caught up in a curse that makes them screw like rabbits.  Which, by the way, we're not doing, so clearly something's wrong with this curse."  There was a pause.  Harry was still staring fiercely at the runes.  "Another thing that hasn't happened yet is the big splash of blood on the walls as we die a gruesome death.  Don't get me wrong, mate, I'm really happy that hasn't happened, but what I want to know is - why?"

 

"We haven't tried to leave without fulfilling the terms of the curse," Harry said grimly.

 

"Which are?"

 

Harry stood up and stuck his wand in his back pocket, and almost at once began to scrub his palms reflexively on his jeans, over and over.  "Two triggers," he said.  "The first person steps on the first trigger, which is the rug.  If he fits the right profile, he arms the second trigger by the door.  The second person walks through the door, treading on the second trigger, and if he fits the right profile too, the trap springs.  And in order to get out of the trap, they have to pay off the curse."  His breathing was shallow and fast, and the horrified note was back in his voice.  "The really shitty part," he commented - although that _wasn't_ the worst part, Ron could tell from his voice, "is that most of the previous victims never stood a chance.  I'm pretty sure they couldn't possibly have worked out what happened when they walked in here; I'm willing to bet they just tried to run out of the door, like you did, when they felt the trap spring.  And the thing is, if you try to leave without paying off the curse, it kills you.  And you can only pay it off with – with sex."

 

They stared at each other.

 

"We have to have sex to disarm the trap?" Ron demanded.

 

Harry was silent.

 

"Oh, bloody hell."  A pause.  "Hang on a minute - if this is a Circle of Ishtar, it's fertility magic too.  Right?  But we're two blokes, so how did we trigger it?"

 

"That's why I keep saying it doesn't make sense," Harry said.  "The triggers are armed so that only two blokes can spring the trap.  Look at the runes!  They're all male."

 

"That is fucking nuts!  What's the point?"

 

"I don't know!  There's some kind of out-of-phase cauldron spell in the middle of the Circle, like an energy sink, but I don't know what it's supposed to do.  Cuneiform isn't my speciality."

 

"And there's nothing we can do to dismantle the trap from the inside?  What about breaking the Circle?"

 

"No, absolutely not," Harry said at once.  "Not without knowing what the symbols on it mean.  The whole spell structure could collapse with us inside it, and if that happens they won't even find our blood on the walls.  We'll just be stuck somewhere between dimensions for the rest of eternity."

 

"Fuck."

 

"Yeah, that's about the size of it."

 

"Well … I suppose this'll teach me not to bring my work on holiday with me in future," Ron said wryly.  "So, um - how far do you reckon we have to go?"

 

Harry stared at him.  "You're not seriously considering this, are you?"

 

"I don't hear you offering any alternatives," Ron pointed out.  "If we can take the curse apart without paying it off, now's the time to say something about it."

 

"I - no.  I can't even begin to think of how to disarm it without knowing why it was set up like this in the first place.  But Ron, it's still a hell of a risk.  Even if we could, you know, pay it off, we don't know what its purpose is.  Somebody set this up this way for a reason.  Paying it might be just the start of our problems!"

 

Ron stuck his hands in his pockets and regarded his friend for moment or two.  Harry's white face and staring eyes were not lost on him.  "Look," he said gently, "what choice do we have?  I don't know about you, but not even Hermione's going to be looking for me for at least three or four days.  We've got no supplies and I don't think this illusion is going to cough up regular meals for us.  And if we try to leave without paying off the curse we end up very messily dead, and that's not in my career plan.  So the way I see it is, paying it off is the least risky of our options."

 

"I don't - "  Harry stopped.  He looked uncomfortably flushed.

 

Ron's ears were burning in sympathy.  "Yeah, well … it's not exactly what I usually go for either, but at least we're mates, right?  It's not like I've never seen you without your kit on before.  So … getting back to what I said before, how far do you reckon it wants us to go?"

 

Harry swallowed.  "Um … probably not - not all the way.  Just, you know, mutual satisfaction I suppose.  But it, well, it's Ishtar, so I reckon … she's a goddess of war as well as the other.  So maybe a bit, well, rough."

 

"Oh Merlin... well, just get it over with and punch me already!"  Ron fought to keep a note of humour in his voice in the face of Harry's obvious dismay and reluctance.  It was dawning on him that for all that Harry had been largely in charge up to this point, he was probably going to have to lead the way from now on.  "Come on, mate, it's not _that_ weird an idea.  We came pretty close to it once or twice at school!" 

 

"Did we?" Harry muttered.

 

Ron didn't know what to make of this.  He didn't have a problem remembering a couple of spontaneous middle-of-the-night and post-Quidditch fumbles between them; granted, they had never talked about it, but he'd just accepted it as part of growing up.  It hadn't occurred to him until now that Harry might not feel the same kind of calm acceptance of it, and his heart sank a little.  And since it was his way to deal with uncomfortable situations with humour, he just kept trying to keep the wisecracks going.

 

"Well, sorry if I'm not your type - oh wait, I must be or you wouldn't have gone out with my sister, right?"  The tension in Harry seemed to ratchet up a notch, but Ron refused to let this deter him.  He reached out and gripped Harry's shoulder; the muscles under his hand were like steel rods, tense enough to almost snap.  "Come on, mate, we can do this," he encouraged him.  "Let's just go for it and get out of here, yeah?"

 

Harry squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then he seemed to sag a little.  "Yeah, what the heck," he agreed tiredly.

 

~~~

 

"I didn't expect to see you back here so soon," Kingsley Shacklebolt said, stopping by Ron's desk a couple of days later.  "I saw your docket - with Potter on the tab I'd have thought the pair of you would make a week of it.  Not like you see all that much of him these days, is it?"

 

Ron gave him a wary glance, but as the question seemed genuine and quite friendly he relaxed a little.  "Yeah, well ... there wasn't all that much to see, and Harry got an owl from Bill calling him back early anyway."

 

Which was perfectly true, although Bill had made it clear that if they were busy Harry could follow the rest of his team in a few days time.  Under the circumstances, however, neither of them had much enthusiasm for continuing their mini road trip and Harry sent the owl back with confirmation that he was on his way.

 

"Did you solve the mystery of Pomerai Lodge?"

 

It was a struggle to raise a grin at the obvious amusement in Kingsley's voice, but Ron managed it somehow.  He'd got a lot better at hiding his true feelings over the years.

 

"The only mystery is why anyone ever bothers visiting the place," he said.

 

"Really?  I've never taken a look myself, but every so often the file swims to the top of the pile, I'm told, and someone feels obliged to investigate.  So it's all hot air and hype, not a killer house at all?"

 

For a split second a memory of the horrible psychic stench of blood hit Ron.  He thrust it aside.  "Yeah - pretty much bare walls and not much else," he lied.  He forced his grin to widen rakishly.  "Easiest day's money I ever earned!"

 

Kingsley snorted.  "Don't expect too many of those!  I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to say hello to Potter though.  Give him my regards the next time you owl him."

 

"Of course."  Ron watched his boss stroll away and drew a silent breath of relief.  He and Harry had agreed the story between them; once the curse had been paid off, Harry had done his best to disarm the trap-spell, but neither of them wanted the whole adventure put down on parchment with all its attendant humiliating detail, so Ron had removed the tracing charm from the file and determinedly buried it in a part of the records vault where it was unlikely to resurface for another hundred years or so.

 

That should have been that, but all the fun of the trip had been destroyed and Ron had been bothered ever since by a growing, nagging sensation that something had been done to their friendship which it wouldn't easily recover from.  He hadn't been bothered by the sexual element of their adventure, but while it hadn't been much of a struggle for either of them to do what was required, Harry had clearly been much more upset by the incident than Ron, and this in turn upset Ron - not from any misplaced hurt or vanity, but simply because he hated to see Harry so distressed about something he felt shouldn't be a big deal for two old friends.  Worse, he was responsible for getting them into the situation to start with, a piece of stupidity he was still berating himself for.

 

They had sworn not to tell anyone, but now Ron was wondering if this had been a mistake.  He wouldn't break his word without a very good reason, but he was accustomed to discussing the tough questions of life with Hermione, who still remained something of an oracle to him.  He wasn't entirely sure how she would react, admittedly, but he couldn't help feeling that keeping something like this from his girlfriend was not a good idea, no matter how uncomfortable a revelation it might prove.

 

The situation worried him enough that he was having trouble concentrating on his work, something which had never happened to him before.

 

He was staring blankly at an old incident report and wondering if there was some way he could relate things to Hermione without mentioning names, times or places, when Priyanka, one of the clerks, popped her head over the partition that screened his desk a little from the rest of the office.

 

"Weasley!  There's a Floo Call for you in Fireplace Two," she told him.

 

Ron frowned.  "A Floo Call?"

 

"International - better hurry up!"

 

"Inter - from who?" he demanded, but she was already halfway across the office, tossing files and slips of paper into various in-trays as she went.

 

"Bloody hell!" he grumbled, and he made haste into the post room where a series of fireplaces took up all of one wall.

 

He was stunned to see his brother Bill's head in the second fireplace.

 

"Bill!  What's going on?"

 

"Where is he?" Bill asked, wasting no time in getting to the point.

 

"Who?" Ron asked, but his stomach lurched with a sudden certainty.

 

"Harry!  He never turned up!  Is he still with you?"

 

"I dropped him at the Flooport two days ago," Ron said, and Bill hissed in frustration.

 

"I've checked every Flooport on the route between here and London, and half a dozen others just in case he got diverted.  No one's seen him and no one's checked his ticket or passport.  As far as I can tell, he never left England!  What's going on?"

 

"I don't know, I haven't seen him!"  Previous worry solidified into fright as Ron tried to think where his friend could be.

 

"I don't have time to talk, Ron, it's too great a distance," Bill said.  "Look, if you find him, tell him to get out here fast.  I can cover for him for a couple of days, but if he misses this trip completely he'll probably lose his job.  Gringotts doesn't give people second chances."

 

"Yeah, yeah - right, okay.  I'll try and find him."

 

"Good.  Thanks."  Bill grimaced, then nodded an apologetic farewell and disappeared from the flames with pop.

 

Ron got up, dusting his jeans off absently.  It was so unlike Harry to do something like this, that right then and there he decided he would have to tell Hermione something if not everything.  He needed a second head for this -

 

No.  Almost at once he changed his mind again.  First he needed to try and find Harry.  It was possible he had a perfectly good explanation for his behaviour; he could even have had an accident.

 

Except - _Where are you going to look for him, pillock?_ he asked himself.  Harry didn't have a permanent address at present; he lived such a peripatetic lifestyle that he mostly crashed on other people's couches for the short periods of time he was in England.  Ron himself was quite accustomed to getting up in the morning and unexpectedly finding Harry in his living room.  That hadn't happened the last few times, admittedly, and in fact Ron wasn't sure where he'd stayed, but Harry had co-workers and other friends.

 

None of which gave him a clue where Harry would be now.  He ran through a mental list of the people he knew Harry might crash with, but he knew it was far from complete.  Apart from Bill, he didn't know any of his co-workers.  And what if he hadn't stayed with anyone else?  Harry still owned number 12 Grimmauld Place, although Ron couldn't imagine why he would go back there.  Still, he could at least Apparate over there and cross it off the list.

 

His eyes wandered almost absently to the post room clock and he was jolted back into full awareness by the time.  Hermione!  He was supposed to be meeting her in the Ministry canteen in ten minutes.

 

He made it to the canteen with five minutes to spare, and was just trying to decide if he should order a lunch for them that he knew he wouldn't eat when a slender dark-haired man in a healer's robe approached him purposefully.

 

"Weasley?  They said I might find you here."

 

Ron stared at him blankly.  The handsome face looked vaguely familiar but he couldn't quite place it.  "Yes?  What can I help you with, Healer - ?"

 

"Goldstein, Tony Goldstein.  We were at school together," the healer prompted, when Ron continued to look perplexed.  "I was in DA?  I was a Ravenclaw.  It's okay, we didn't really get to know each other well."

 

"Oh, right.  Sorry.  What can I do for you?  Is it urgent, because I'm supposed to be meeting someone - "

 

"It's about Harry," Tony said, and Ron realised that the sinking feeling he'd had all morning was actually just a premonition that his whole day was going to be one large, Harry-shaped lump of worry.

 

"What about him?" he asked warily.

 

Tony hesitated, glancing around.  Ron couldn't blame him for that; it didn't _look_ like the other people milling around the canteen were eavesdropping, but anything said in this room was guaranteed to hit the Ministry rumour-mill within half an hour.

 

"There's a booth over there," he said, gesturing.  "Come on.  I can silence it if you like."  Which would also be fuel for gossip, but it was better that the gossip be entirely uninformed than halfway accurate.

 

The booth didn't provide anything like proper privacy, but it was better than nothing. 

 

"All right, what's this about?" Ron asked, slipping his wand back into his pocket and giving an overly-interested Ministry drone at the nearest table a quelling glare.

 

Tony fiddled with one of the paper packets of sugar from a pot in the middle of the table and gave him a look that was difficult to interpret.  "You went on a trip with Harry last week," he said.  "Can I ask - did anything odd happen to him while you were travelling together?"

 

The tension he was experiencing was beginning to give Ron a headache, and it certainly wasn't making him feel particularly friendly or helpful.  "Even if something did, what business is it of yours?" he demanded.  "If it comes to that, how do you even know we went anywhere together?"

 

"He told me," Tony replied, and Ron blinked.

 

"He told you.  Why would he tell _you_ anything?"

 

Tony's lips twisted wryly.  "We're friends, Weasley.  Didn't he tell you that?"

 

"I'm an Auror, not the keeper of his address book!" Ron said testily.  "Whatever.  What makes you think something happened to him?"

 

"Because he turned up at my flat last night and he was behaving a bit ... strangely.  And - "

 

"You saw him last night?" Ron interrupted, sitting up.  "Where is he now?"

 

"I don't know.  That's what I was about to say - before I could get to the bottom of things, he took off and didn't come back."

 

"He should have been in Peru two days ago," Ron said, and Tony nodded.

 

"Yes, I know, that's one of the things I don't understand.  He told me he was meeting your brother and his team out there when he got back from your trip."

 

Ron stared at him.  "He told ... Goldstein, how well do you know him?"

 

The healer's wry expression became more pronounced.  "Ah.  He really didn't tell you, then?  He said he was going to."

 

"Tell me _what?_ " Ron asked, exasperated.  "Look, I'm having a really crap day, Goldstein, and - "

 

"Please, it's Tony."

 

"Whatever!  Could you just spit out whatever's on your mind, instead of beating about the bush?  I don't have time for this crap."  He was conscious that his tone was getting ever sharper and more impatient, which was really not like him, but right now he couldn't be bothered wasting time on the niceties.

 

Certainly his apparent hostility was contributing to Tony's reluctance to be more forthcoming, but after a moment's hesitation he said: "Harry and I are friends, Weasley."

 

"So?  He's got loads of friends."

 

"I don't mean like that.  I mean ... we've been seeing each other.  As more than just friends."

 

Ron stared at him.  For a long moment he couldn't quite make sense of what the healer had said, then all at once the words rearranged themselves in his head and he realised what Tony was telling him.  And just as quickly, he rejected it.  He couldn't deal with it right at that moment.

 

"Are you having a laugh?" he demanded.

 

Tony began to look unhappier still.  "I promise you, Weasley, laughing is the last thing on my mind right now," he said.  "I wouldn't have told you at all, but Harry's welfare means more to me than your feelings."

 

"My _feelings?_ Goldstein - "

 

A shadow fell across their table; when Ron looked up Hermione was standing there, her mouth working silently. 

 

"Crap!" he muttered, and he quickly released the silencing spell.

 

"Why did you have the table warded?" she asked.  "I'm sorry I'm late.  Hello, Tony!  I didn't expect to see you here."  Her smile slipped as she sensed the tension between the two men.  "Is something wrong?"

 

"I needed to have a word with Weasley about Harry," Tony said, and some silent message seemed to pass between him and Hermione.

 

Ron's annoyance ratcheted up another notch at this.  "Do you know him?" he demanded of Hermione, jerking a thumb at the healer.

 

"Of course I do - we went to school together, remember?"  She gave Tony a concerned look.  "I think I know what's going on here.  Is he making a fuss about it?"

 

"It's not just that," Tony began, but Ron was now quite incensed.

 

"Making a fuss?" he snapped at Hermione, forgetting the crowded canteen and the fact that he'd removed the silencing spell.  "Are you telling me you knew about him and Harry, and didn't tell me?"

 

Hermione's eyes widened at his surly tone.  "It wasn't something I had any right to tell you," she shot back.  "Ron, for heaven's sake, calm down!"

 

Her words might not have made any difference, but the quick look she cast over her shoulder at their uninvited audience did.  Remembering where he was, Ron tried to wrestle his emotions back under control.  Conscious that he really did have a headache now, he took a deep breath and got up from the table, running a slightly shaky hand over his hair.

 

"You know what, I just don't have time for this right now."

 

Tony got up too, his brow furrowing with concern.  "Weasley, I'm sorry if - "

 

"I don't care what you are, Goldstein, I have to find him."

 

"Ron?" Hermione said worriedly.  "What's going on?"

 

"Nothing," Ron said.  He didn't know why he said that, only that he didn't want anyone else interfering, not even Hermione and certainly not Anthony Goldstein.  Whatever was going on with Harry, it was Ron's problem, not theirs.

 

"Weasley, wait!"  Tony grabbed his arm.

 

Ron reacted without even thinking, twisting his arm free and turning into the move with a move of his own that had been taught to him by the Auror specialists.  Tony went flying back into his seat and Ron jumped back, rubbing at the spot where the healer had grabbed him as though it burned.  The canteen was suddenly very quiet.

 

"Ron!"  Hermione was horrified.  "What are you doing?"

 

"Nobody touches me," Ron said, breathing heavily.  "I just - I don't want to be touched.  Okay?"

 

Tony got up again slowly, his eyes fixed on Ron.  "That's what Harry said too," he said.  "Last night.  He wouldn't sit still, he was moody, he was angry for no reason, and he didn't want to be touched."

 

"Fuck you," Ron said, but he said it more out of fear than anger.  He turned to leave and recoiled again - this time from a near collision with Kingsley Shacklebolt.

 

The senior Auror at once held his hands up and away from him, proving that he'd witnessed at least part of the scene.  "Something amiss, Weasley?" he asked blandly, but his eyes were wary and when Ron tried to step around him, he blocked his path.

 

"I have somewhere I need to be," Ron said through gritted teeth.  "Sir."

 

"I think the place where you need to be is in my office, explaining what's going on," Kingsley said, his deep voice purposely level and calm.

 

"I can't, I have to ...  I'll speak to you later, when I've found Harry," Ron said, now a little desperate.  It didn't escape his notice that there were at least three other Aurors in the canteen and all of them were on their feet, wands discreetly out and moving unobtrusively to prevent his escape.  They might not know what was going on, but they'd heard what Kingsley said to him.

 

"Mr. Potter will have to wait."

 

"You don't understand," Ron said, his voice rising despite his best efforts to control it.

 

"I understand that if you don't do as I ask, right now and voluntarily, you'll be doing it anyway but the conversation we'll have will not be one you want to have with me," Kingsley said, his voice still very calm but now with a warning note in it.

 

For a mad moment Ron seriously considered trying to make a break for it.  Then his essential sanity reasserted itself, and he forced himself to relax a little, just a very little.  After all, Kingsley still didn't know what was going on.  He might be able to bluff his way out of this situation.

 _And you do know what's going on?_ part of him demanded acidly but he shoved that thought to one side.

 

"All right," he said reluctantly, and Kingsley nodded slowly.

 

"Thank you.  Miss Granger, Mr. Goldstein – please join us."

 

This was not good.  Ron felt reasonably sure he could talk his way past anything Tony might say, but Hermione was another matter entirely.  She knew him far too well to be fobbed off with clever explanations, and he spent most of the long walk up to the Aurors' Office trying to come up with plausible stories to cover whatever was happening to him and Harry.

 

They were taking seats inside Kingsley's office before it occurred to Ron to wonder at how quickly he had gone from lamenting the impossibility of discussing the situation with Hermione, to actively wanting to conceal it from her just as circumstances conspired to make it possible to tell her after all.

 _What the hell is going on with me?_   A more pressing worry drowned this out.  _Where's Harry now?_   He had a brief inner sense of something - movement, panic, fleeing, hiding - but it was gone again before he could identify it.

 

Kingsley was scribbling a quick note on one of the multitude of paper aeroplane messengers that infested the Ministry; he tossed it out into the main office, then closed the door and went to take his seat behind the desk.

 

"Right," he said briskly.  "This situation would appear to have something to do with Harry Potter, so Mr. Goldstein, perhaps you could start this off.  You came to Weasley here with some concerns about Potter, I believe?"

 

"Yes sir."  Tony quickly outlined the story of Harry's arrival at his flat the previous evening, and the outcome that had sent him looking for Ron at the first opportunity the following day.

 

"I see," Kingsley said when he was done.  He looked at Ron thoughtfully.  "What's your take on this?"

 

"I'm worried, obviously," Ron said, doing his best to project calm concern.  "I had a Floo Call from my brother Bill just before I met Goldstein in the canteen – he said Harry hadn't turned up in Peru when he was supposed to and there was no evidence to suggest he'd ever left England.  But I dropped Harry at the Flooport with all his kit two days ago.  I told Bill I'd try and track him down, and find out what's going on."

 

"I see," Kingsley said again.  "Why didn’t you go and look for him straight away?"

 

"Because I was supposed to meet Hermione for lunch and I wanted to let her know what was going on before I left."

 

"And then you ran into Goldstein here."

 

Ron felt himself stiffen very slightly; he didn't know why.  "Yeah."

 

"Were you surprised by what he told you?"

 

"Well, of course - "

 

"How was Potter when you left him at the Flooport?"

 

"He was fine," Ron lied.  Harry hadn't really been 'fine' at all, but they'd both been subdued and he hadn't thought much about it beyond the obvious.

 

Kingsley was watching him very narrowly, which made Ron wonder what his face could be showing that he wasn't aware of.

 

"Why didn't you want Goldstein to touch you?" Kingsley asked abruptly.

 

Ron twitched.  He still didn't understand his reaction himself.  "I was - I mean I didn't know about him and Harry," he said.  That wasn't the reason at all, but he knew it was the one most likely to be believed.

 

Hermione gave him an admonitory look.  "Ron, please don't tell me you're going to be difficult about it!  Just because it's Harry?  You were fine about Dean and Seamus – "

 

"It's not the same - "  Grasping at straws, he added, "He was seeing my sister, for crying out loud!"  The words came out of his mouth with obnoxious ease and he hated himself for the deception.  But the truth was that part of him _was_ angry about it; angry that Harry hadn't simply told him, angry that this might have been at the root of Harry's misery when they were trapped together by the curse of Pomerai Lodge.  Part of him wanted to say to Harry: _You could sleep with him, but having sex with me was such a horrible idea?_

 

He didn't understand why that was suddenly so hurtful.

 

There was a sharp rap on the door, and one of Ron's colleagues, Auror Bridestow, put her head around the door.  "I'm sorry, sir," she said to Kingsley.  "Records say they don't have the Pomerai Lodge file.  The tracking charm won't locate it."

 

Kingsley gave Ron an exasperated look.  "Where have you put it, Weasley?"

 

"Back in the Records," Ron said, quite truthfully.

 

"Really.  And you wouldn't care to share with us why the tracking charm can't find it?"

 

It was tempting to try and look innocently surprised, or to come out with some kind of smart remark, but Ron controlled both impulses and held his tongue.  Silence would also condemn him, of course, but it was better than actively antagonising Kingsley.

 

"I see," Kingsley said, and there was a note in his voice that deeply unsettled Ron.  "Thank you, Bridestow.  Get Shuffleton and Mackie, and start a search for Harry Potter – yes, _that_ Harry Potter.  Find someone who knows his usual haunts and get a list of them.  Ginevra Weasley would be a good person to ask."

 

Ron winced.  His sister was one person he really want involved in this.  "Hermione and I are sitting right here," he said, through gritted teeth.

 

"You'll have to forgive me if I don't trust your judgement right now," Kingsley retorted, "and I need Miss Granger's input here.  Seeing as it would appear that Pomerai Lodge is not, after all, the harmless ruin you've led me to believe, I think it's about time you explained exactly what you and Potter found while you were off on your little _road trip_ together."

 

Ron clung onto his calm with an effort.  He accepted now that Kingsley would have to be told - broadly - what had happened.  He even accepted that at some point he would have to give Hermione some version of the events.  What he did not want was to have to relate the whole unedited saga right now to the three people sitting with him in this office.

 

"Fine," he said, "fine.  But … can we just find Harry first?  Please?  I'll tell you everything you want to know as soon as I've found him and I know he's okay."

 

"What makes you so sure you're the one who can find him?" Kingsley asked dryly.

 

It came as almost as big a surprise to Ron as did to the others when he said, "Because I know where he is."

 

And yet it was true - even as the words were spilling out of his mouth, part of him could almost see, in his mind's eye, a dilapidated and shadowy hallway and stairs with their mouldering carpets and mildewed wallpaper.

 

"How can you possible know that when you obviously _didn't_ know ten minutes ago?" Hermione demanded.

 

"I don't know, do I?" Ron snarled at her, and he was instantly appalled at himself for speaking to her like that.  "Merlin, Hermione, I'm sorry – "

 

She shook her head.  "That doesn't matter - you're clearly not yourself.  Just tell me how you know where Harry is."

 

"I don't know!  I just – I know where he is."

 

"And where's that?" Tony asked, rather coolly.

 

"Grimmauld Place."  It was weird … it would be going a little far to say that he could actually _see_ Harry prowling around the faded surroundings of the house that had once been headquarters to the Order of the Phoenix, but he knew indubitably that this was what his friend was doing right at that moment.

 

"But Harry doesn't stay there anymore, does he?" Hermione said, frowning.  "He was talking about selling it last year …"

 

"He's there," Ron said, and he looked warily at Kingsley.

 

"It's just a remarkable coincidence," Kingsley said, his tone growing drier by the moment, "that while Grimmauld Place would be high on my personal list of places to look for Potter, it also happens to be the one place no one but yourself or Miss Granger here is likely to be able to find, let alone enter."

 

"I can't help that, can I?"  Ron's control of his temper was beginning to fray a little.  "He's there, okay?  I don't know for how much longer though, so let's go and pick him up."

 

Kingsley took his time considering this, time that was measured out by Ron's increasing agitation, no matter how hard he tried to control his fidgets.

 

"I've a good mind to put you in a secure holding cell while Miss Granger and I go and look," he said, and he watched with clinical interest as Ron's hands gripped the arms of his chair convulsively.  Ron forced himself to relax and fold his hands across his lap instead.  "Interesting," Kingsley remarked.  "Make no mistake, Weasley, you _will_ be telling me the whole story of your visit to Pomerai Lodge.  In the meantime, I'm minded to take you along with us - "

 

Ron relaxed a fraction more, only to tense again at Kingsley's next words.

 

" - If only because your behaviour makes me wonder precisely what manner of welcome we'll receive from Mr. Potter.  Something tells me we'll be safer if you're with us."

 

Ron found that he couldn't disagree with this.  He might not know exactly what Harry was doing or why, but he had a strong sense that things were not at all well for his friend, and it only served to increase his own agitation.

 

"Can we go now?" he asked impatiently.

 

Kingsley stood up.  "Just as soon as you've handed me your wand for safekeeping."

 

"My - but how am I supposed to Apparate there without my wand?"   _Or defend myself if Harry doesn't react the way I expect him to,_ the treacherous part of his mind added.

 

"I'm perfectly capable of side-along Apparition, Weasley."

 

~~~

 

They left Tony behind, something Tony himself wasn't particularly happy about but accepted with greater equanimity than Ron would have done.  Although to be fair, Ron admitted to himself, even a rampaging troll might have accepted the situation more calmly than he would at this point.  Kingsley seemed rather alarmingly attuned to what was going on with him; his jumpy reaction to having to hold the senior Auror's arm to Apparate was met with an offer of a Calming Draught that was made only partly in jest.

 

Then they arrived in Grimmauld Place, landing behind an old red telephone box that still lingered on the corner of the square.  The street was quiet and as sleepy in the summer afternoon as it ever got.

 

"Is he still here?" Kingsley asked, as the three of them walked up to the spot between numbers 11 and 13.

 

"I think so."  But Ron was no longer sure.  He looked up at the dingy row of houses and before his eyes number 12 seemed to squeeze its way out from between its neighbours, pushing them aside like bubbles in a bathtub.  It looked as cold and unwelcoming as ever, and the strange awareness inside him that had been telling him _Harry's here_ for the better part of an hour was suddenly silent.

 

He said nothing to Kingsley or Hermione as they climbed the front steps and tapped on the door to open it.  After all, it wasn't as though he'd had any proof Harry was there in the first place.

 

Someone had been there, though, that much was evident to all of them when the door swung open.  One thing Grimmauld Place was never short of was dust on every surface.  As sunlight shafted in through the open door, it illuminated swirls of dust in the air and a visible trail through the hallway and up the stairs.

 

Ron stepped through the door, staring down at the footprints.  They were fresh and the dust still on the move.  Someone had been there _minutes_ ago.  He looked up the stairs and cleared his throat softly.

 

"Harry?  Mate, where are you?  Are you okay?"

 

Silence.

 

Following him, Hermione added her voice to his.  "Harry, if you're here, say something!  Do you need help?"

 

"There are footprints going both ways," Kingsley said quietly.  "Down to the kitchen and upstairs.  Is he looking for something, do you think?"

 

Ron shook his head.  "Dunno.  I'll check upstairs, yeah?"

 

"Very well.  I'll check this floor and the kitchen.  Miss Granger, go with him - call me if you find Potter."

 

"This place doesn't get any homelier, eh?" Ron muttered, leading the way up the stairs.  The old hissing gas lamps had sprung to life when the front door closed behind them, but at least Mrs. Black's portrait and the others were long gone and unable to set up a racket.

 

"Where do you think we should look first?" Hermione asked, slipping her wand out of her sleeve.  "The room you both used when we stayed here?"

 

"That's as good a place as any."

 

"You don't know then?"

 

"Not exactly."  Ron led the way across the landing and up the next set of stairs.  "I can't explain it."

 

"It's all right, you know," she said softly.  "We'll work it out and help him.  I can tell from your face that you think it's really bad, but Ron - we _can_ work it out, you know, whatever it is.  We always do."

 

Ron swallowed.  He was beginning to hate himself quite a lot, and not just for what he was doing to Hermione - or even to Tony Goldstein maybe - but for the whole horrible mess he'd inflicted on himself and Harry and all the people it was dragging into its orbit, like the eye of a hurricane.  And he didn't know what he could do to put it right; all he could hope was that he found Harry before things got any worse.

 

"You don't know what's happened yet," he said.  He tried to say it roughly, but the constriction in his throat made it come out hoarse and unsteady instead.

 

"No, but you're going to tell us, aren't you?  As soon as we find Harry and make sure he's all right."

 

Her voice was so damn gentle and understanding.  No blame or accusation, when by rights she ought to be giving him the tongue-lashing of his life.

 

The room he'd shared with Harry during the horcrux-hunt was in front of them, the door ajar.  Ron pushed it open and stepped inside, Hermione close on his heels.  The room was a mess, as though someone had been through it searching for something.

 

"Well," Hermione said after a moment, striving for a lighter note, "I can't remember how the pair of you left it, so it's hard to tell if this is the way you left it or not."

 

"No, he's been here," Ron said, and sickening calm settled over him.

 

"He's not here now though."

 

"No."

 

"Is he in the house at all?" she asked.  It sounded as though she knew the answer to that one, but Ron turned to look at her anyway and shook his head.

 

"How long have you known?" Hermione asked, her eyes searching his face.

 

"Honestly?  Before we walked through the front door.  I reckon he hadn’t been gone long though."

 

They looked at each other.

 

The worst part, Ron knew, was that she trusted him and he had known all the way up the stairs that he was going to use that trust against her.  He hated himself, but even knowing that, he didn't stop.

 

"You know I love you, don't you?" he said, and he meant it.

 

"Of course I know, silly …"

 

Ron reached out and took the wand out of her hand - the wand that she was holding very loosely, almost unnoticed, because she hadn't really expected to need it, even against Harry.  It happened too quickly for her to stop him, and her eyes were widening in shock and disbelief even as he stepped back and pointed it at her.  Her expression made his heart tear a little.

 

"I'm sorry," he whispered, and he hit her with the stunning spell before she could speak and crack his resolve.

 

~~~

 

This time Ron could see him, standing by the window, just out of sight of anyone looking, his eyes restlessly combing the street below and fidgeting, fidgeting, always fidgeting …  And when Ron Apparated into his flat he was standing there, dishevelled and unshaven, his eyes bloodshot and panicky and his clothes all crumpled and sweaty, the same clothes he'd been wearing two days before when Ron dropped him off at the Flooport.  The detached Auror part of Ron's brain, that was still operating normally and cataloguing what was happening to them both, wondered what had happened to Harry's kit bag.

 

"I knew I'd find you here," he said.  He kept a cautious distance, unsure how Harry would react if he got too close, although what he really wanted to do was reach out and hug him.  "Mate - "

 

Harry was so jittery, bouncing a little on his heels and rubbing his hands restlessly over his forearms.  "I tried not to come," he said, and his voice was scratchy.  He looked and sounded so tired that Ron almost felt it in his own bones.

 

"Why would you do something daft like that?" he asked reasonably.  "Haven't we always come to each other when we're in trouble?"

 

"This is different though - right?"

 

"That's one word for it.  I got us into this one."

 

"Doesn't matter.  I'm not blaming you."

 

"Maybe you should.  Although …"  Ron bit his lip, but he had to say it.  "Why didn't you just tell me about you and Goldstein?"

 

Harry flinched.  "Would it have made any difference?  Not like we could have changed things, is it?  Besides …"  His voice trailed off and his eyes skittered away from Ron's, jumpy, evasive.

 

"Yeah, but … never mind.  You look like you need a bath, a meal and some kip before we do anything else."

 

Harry shook his head.  "Can't.  Not here.  There's someone watching your flat, did you know?"

 

Ron cursed.  "I should have guessed, but I didn't think they'd be so quick.  Okay, we need to skip out of here sharp-ish and find somewhere to hole up until we can work out what's going on with us.  Let me grab my spare wand and some gear.  Have you got any gold on you?  I'm not too flush at the moment, but I don't suppose we dare stop off at Gringotts."

 

"I've got a few Galleons."  Harry followed him into his bedroom.  "Why do you need your spare wand?"

 

As he got closer, Ron noticed that the jitters seemed to ease off a little, and as a result he felt a little calmer himself.  "Kingsley confiscated mine before we left the Ministry.  This is Hermione's - I'll leave it here where she can find it."

 

"Is she going to be pissed off about this?"

 

"I reckon we can bank on that," Ron said, wincing a little inside.

 

"I'm sorry."

 

"Don't even start.  It's not your fault."  Ron dug his spare wand out of the dresser, shoved the drawer shut and turned around.  Harry was standing so close that he nearly knocked him over and they grabbed each other for balance.  "Whoa - !"

 

The sensation was extraordinary, as though something flowed out of him and into Harry, and vice versa.  At once Ron felt clearer headed and more like himself than he had for days.  Harry straightened up too, and despite his rough appearance he began to look more calm and collected, and even rested.

 

"That's better," he said with a sigh of relief.  Then he looked up at Ron, wide-eyed.  "What the heck?"

 

"Search me."  The feeling was a little euphoric, and he found himself noticing things that would ordinarily have passed him by, like the shape of Harry's lips and the familiar muskiness of his personal scent under two days' worth of sweat.

 

Harry kissed him.

 

That was bad - not the kiss itself, which was _amazing_ , utterly unlike anything Ron had ever experienced before, but bad because he wanted it and so much more, so badly, right there and then, and the exhilaration of it was so intense that he lost track of time and place and was just about to push Harry back onto his bed -

 

A ward pinged and he managed to drag himself away from Harry.  "Wards," he said indistinctly, and then with more force engendered by alarm - "Fuck!  That was the alarm on the street door - someone's coming up to the flat!"

 

"Apparate!" Harry said.  "Where to?"

 

"No, I want to take the car, it's less traceable by magic - go out the back - "

 

He shoved the wand into his sleeve, left Hermione's wand on the dresser, and pushed Harry toward the kitchen.  There was a door there that let out onto the fire exit.

 

Someone was pounding on the front door.  _"Weasley!  Open up - "_

 

The catch on the fire exit door was stiff with disuse.  Harry hit it with a fast unlocking charm and shoved it open, tumbling out onto the iron staircase that zigzagged down the rear of the building.  Too late - someone was already coming up that way, wand drawn.  Ron saw Bridestow's face, professional determination layered over the natural alarm felt by someone obliged to confront at wandpoint wizarding Britain's greatest living hero.  Then  he grabbed Harry around the shoulders and Disapparated. 

 

Or tried to.  Someone had clearly had the forethought to slap an anti-Apparition ward over the building.  Ron swore, panicking, and tried to back into the flat, heard considerably more than one person approaching from behind and above, and felt Harry jerk free of his grip.  He saw his wand come up and the fear flash into Bridestow's face -

 _"NO!"_

 

The one thing he remembered later about the ensuing mêlée was shouting, pleading with them not to hurt Harry as his friend seemed to lose every shred of control and Aurors and MLEs seemed to erupt from all sides, piling onto the two of them in the one manoeuvre neither of them could have anticipated or countered.

 

~~~

 

Ron looked up when the cell door was unlocked.  He wasn't sure how long he'd spent in there, for he'd been given the Calming Draught Kingsley had threatened him with earlier and it had knocked him out for what he suspected was several hours.  The healer summoned to administer it was Tony Goldstein, who had supported him dispassionately when he threw up over everyone's shoes and calmly told Kingsley that it was mainly down to stress, nothing else.  Ron would have liked to dispute that statement, but he wasn't in any fit state to comment on his own condition at that precise moment

 

Ron had no idea where Harry was, and whenever he thought about him there was an odd fuzziness at the back of his head which he felt sure couldn't mean anything good.

 

Kingsley stepped inside the cell and surveyed him grimly for a few moments.  "How are you feeling?" he asked eventually.

 

No point in lying anymore.  "Like shit."

 

"I daresay.  Ready to answer some questions?"

 

"Do I have any choice?"

 

"You have as much time as the healers say it will take for you to be fit enough to take Veritaserum," Kingsley told him flatly, "which is about another two hours.  Either way, you're going to tell us what happened to you and Potter."

 

"Where is he?  Is he all right?"

 

"That depends on what you call "all right".  The moment he was released from a full body-bind he tore up one of the interview rooms and caused enough general damage and injury that we had no choice but to stun him and get Goldstein to administer a knockout potion.  He's in St. Mungo's for the time being."

 

Ron groaned and let his head fall back against the wall.  "Oh Merlin, no ..."

 

"What would you have us do?" Kingsley demanded.  "We'd have done that no matter who he was, but the fact that it's Potter of all people - he's not exactly an average wizard, Weasley!  Between his magical strength and his reputation, I was having trouble finding anyone willing to get close enough just to try and stun him."

 

"You could try letting me manage him!" Ron shot back.  "He was fine until all those idiots put the jump on us!"

 

"Do I have to remind you that you deliberately misled myself and Miss Granger into taking you to Grimmauld Place?  And that you left her - your fiancée, Weasley! - stunned on the floor so that you could go chasing after Potter unhindered?"

 

"Couldn't have been that big a surprise," Ron muttered.  "You had enough people waiting at my flat."

 

"No, that would be Stickleby from the MLEs.  He overheard the contretemps in the canteen, and since he doesn't feel any great affection for you _or_ Potter since he lost his brother in the war, he took it into his head that the pair of you were finally showing your true colours and staked out your flat on a hunch."  Kingsley seemed to struggle with himself for a moment, before saying acidly, "Probably the one and only time in his career when he's actually done the right thing, albeit for entirely the wrong reasons.  He'll be dining out on Rita Skeeter's Sickle tonight, all because _you_ didn't tell me the truth from the beginning!"

 

Oh, _damn._   Ron closed his eyes wearily.  Just what Harry didn't need - more of Rita Skeeter's 'exclusives'.

 

"Tell me you'll be stringing the little shit up by his balls if anything he says turns up in the _Daily Prophet_ tomorrow," he said.

 

"That's the one happy thought sustaining me through this whole sorry mess.  Now - are you going to tell us what really happened?"

 

"I can't believe you don't already know," Ron said, opening his eyes and dragging himself up off the hard bunk.

 

"We found the file - after an exhaustive search," Kingsley said dryly, "and we now have your brother's opinion of Pomerai Lodge, but it'd be helpful if you filled in the inevitable holes."

 

"My brother?  Which one?"

 

"Bill, of course.  When in doubt about a curse, ask a Cursebreaker," his boss said.  "Isn't that what you did?"

 

Ron stared at him glumly.  "Yeah, and look what happened."

 

~~~

 

Flooing internationally was always an exhausting business, even if it was between two places as relatively close as, say, London and Dublin.  Flooing across continents was best done in bursts, leaving an hour or two between each trip to recover, so it was no surprise to Ron to find that his brother Bill was looking distinctly the worse for wear after Flooing non-stop from Peru.  To make matters worse, he'd stopped in London only long enough to pick up one of Kingsley's more trusted lieutenants before heading down to the Westcountry to investigate Pomerai Lodge for himself.  Seeing his red-rimmed eyes and the grey tinge exhaustion had given his skin, Ron felt more ashamed than ever.  On hearing that Bill had gone to Pomerai Lodge, his biggest worry had been the fact that the Auror with him was Ezekiel Hengist, rather than one of the women; and he'd cursed himself for not having at least told Kingsley about the trap-spell.

 

Bill had little trouble deciphering the relief on his youngest brother's face when he saw him.  "Give me some credit, Ron," he said, slumping in the chair beside Kingsley's desk and accepting a mug of coffee with relief.  "Unlike some people, I don't go waltzing blindly into trap-spells so easily these days."

 

"You found it?  Harry hoped he'd disarmed it."

 

"I didn't need to find it.  I could tell it was a trap-spell just from the description Kingsley gave me."  He took a sip of the coffee and gave Ron a look that was weirdly reminiscent of their father; a weary sort of resignation.  "The rest of it you'll have to give me because there's nothing left at the house."

 

Ron couldn't decide if he was relieved by this or not.  Not that he wanted the spell to remain a risk to anyone unwary enough to enter the house, but it would have been reassuring to know what Bill made of it.

 

"So it's gone?  The trap's definitely disarmed?"

 

"No, Ron, the _house_ is gone.  I'm having a bit of trouble working out how the pair of you managed to trigger this thing, given the state the place is in."

 

Ron stared at him.  "It was still there when we left!  Weird little mediaeval manor house, two storeys, boarded up windows, creepy garden?"

 

Bill tilted his head, giving Ron an interested look.  "The house was intact?"

 

"Completely …"  Realisation dawned.  "Merlin.  We wondered why the previous Auror's report didn't say anything about the house being in good nick."

 

Kingsley snorted and shoved a mug of coffee across his desk to Ron.  "Time to tell us everything, Weasley.  And I do mean _everything._ "

 

"Yeah," Ron muttered.  In spite of everything, he still felt the deepest reluctance to talk about what had happened.  On the other hand, Harry was stuck in St. Mungo's and unless he could find out what had happened it seemed likely that his friend would stay there for the foreseeable future.  Which was unthinkable.

 

He drew a slow breath.  "I feel like a fucking idiot now, but it seemed like a good idea at the time …"

 

Telling the story took a while, especially the part about how they'd disarmed the trap, when it seemed like his mouth would glue up completely rather than spit out even a highly euphemistic account of their actions.  It helped that Kingsley and Bill treated it all with the utmost seriousness and passed neither comment nor judgement on what he told them until it was done.  When he finally fell silent, Bill stretched slightly in his chair and hmm'd a little, frowning.

 

"A Circle of Ishtar," he said thoughtfully.  "That's a quirk.  And two interlinked triggers.  A precision spell to trap a specific prey, with no obvious bait."

 

"One might hazard a conjecture," Kingsley said.  "Accidental?"

 

"I think it has to be," Bill said, with a nod.  "It's hundreds of years old for a start, but it's not like a tomb or a treasure cache, so there's no reason I can think of why something like this would be set up to catch a trespasser.  And then there's the Circle of Ishtar.  To me, that says it's a selfish set-up, aimed at someone in particular.  Since it's highly unlikely the witch or wizard who set it is still alive, I'd have to conclude that it was never triggered by its original target and it's been lying there like a forgotten mantrap ever since, waiting for the right sort of person to step into it."

 

"Great," Ron said restlessly.  "I reckon Harry and me pretty much worked that one out for ourselves.  The big question is - what did it do to us and how do we undo it?"

 

Bill was too tired to be tactful.  "No idea."

 

"Bill - "

 

"I'm serious, little brother.  Pretty much everything I know about this curse you just told me."

 

Ron wrestled his sudden panic under control with an effort.  "Then we're screwed," he said as steadily as he could, "because it's pretty obvious there was more to it than just paying it off like we did."

 

"Well, obviously," Bill said.  He rubbed his eyes, looking tireder than ever.  "All you did when you paid it was address the power balance - it required you to perform a specific action, like putting weights on both sides of a set of scales, before it would release you.  It'd be a pretty useless spell if that was all it did though.  The trap was just there to facilitate the main part of the spell.  Think of it like a bee."

 

"What?"

 

"A bee visits a flower to collect nectar," Kingsley said.  "In the process pollen rubs off the flower's stamens onto the bee, which carries it away with it.  When it reaches the next flower, some of the pollen on its legs will rub off onto that flower, thus pollinating it."

 

Ron stared at him, revolted.  "Are you suggesting …?"

 

"It's just a rough analogy," Bill said hastily.  "Merlin, I'm tired …  Ron, I'm not saying it's using you for some kind of weird pollination!  I'm just saying that it took something it wanted, but that was just the first part of the process.  There's obviously another half to the spell and we have to work out what that is."  He rubbed his face again and smothered a yawn.  "Tomorrow, I'm afraid.  I'm done in."

 

"Fair enough," Kingsley said.  "I'll get some people to look through this file again, and start pulling information on the individual deaths.  There might be some useful information that got overlooked."

 

"Find out who the first victims were," Bill said.  "That could give us an idea what the spell was intended for.  Although with something this old …"

 

"Harry asked something," Ron remembered.  "Who owns the house now?"

 

"I looked into that earlier," Kingsley said.  "Technically, it would seem it still belongs to the Pomeroy family if there are any of them left.  Originally a Norman family, mixed magical and Muggle - the wizard branch died out in Tudor times.  I've no information on the Muggle family, but the castle was bought by a Muggle duke centuries ago.  The Ministry manages the ghosts at the castle, of course, but that's a common arrangement and we have no involvement in the Muggles' business apart from that.  Bere Pomeroy and Pomerai Lodge were not included in the sale."

 

"No help there then," Bill yawned.

 

"Go home and get some sleep," Kingsley advised him.  "We'll meet again in the morning."

 

"What about me?" Ron asked. 

 

Kingsley subjected him to a long, considering stare.  "Consider yourself on paid suspension," he said finally.  "Go home, get some rest, stay out of trouble.  Take your brother with you," he added.  "The pair of you can keep an eye on each other."

 

"What about Harry?"

 

"He's safe where he is," Kingsley said, not unkindly.

 

"But he's stuck in St. Mungo's and - "

 

"He's there for a reason, Weasley."  A note of warning entered Kingsley's voice.  "I know you don't like the place, but trust me - with the state he was in, it was the only possible option.  They’ll keep him comfortable tonight and we can reassess things in the morning."

 

"Why is he like that when I'm not?" Ron said, but he didn't really expect an answer.

 

"Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not entirely convinced all your puffskeins are safely in the nest even now," was the dry response.

 

But the question seemed to penetrate Bill's growing fog of exhaustion.  "Because Harry's been off his game for few months," he said in a slurred voice.  "Had a bit of trouble in Yucatan last year - got trapped in a pyramid for a few days.  Did a number on his head.  He was probably a bit more vulnerable than you."

 

"Great.  I wish I'd known that before we took off."  Ron swallowed.  "I wish I'd known a lot of things before."

 

"No point in dwelling on it," Kingsley said firmly.  "Now go home."

 

"Can I visit Harry?" Ron asked, but he already knew the answer.

 

"No.  They have him under sedation, Weasley.  Besides, do you really think it's a good idea?"

 

He knew it wasn't.  He also knew that it didn't matter a damn.

 

"Don't even think about it," Kingsley warned him.  "I'm trusting you, Weasley, because I think that with Potter at a distance you're reasonably rational and able to appreciate that you can't achieve anything here without help.  But I can still find room for you in the cells if that's the way you want to play it.  Understood?"

 

Defeated, Ron nodded and turned to pull Bill out of his chair before he fell asleep completely.

 

~~~

 

Ron didn't sleep that night.  Whatever they'd given Harry was only partially effective; he was groggy but agitated and restless all through the night, and although Ron was to a certain extent detached from it, he wasn't able to ignore his friend's distress.  He made himself lie on his bed - because every floorboard in his elderly flat creaked and he didn't want to disturb Bill's rest by pacing about - but he got no respite whatsoever and Bill's reaction in the morning was to take one look at him and swear.

 

"Go back to bed!" he ordered.  "Bloody hell, Ron, you look like something a dragon threw up."

 

"You planning to give me another Calming Draught?" Ron asked him curtly.

 

"If I had one to hand - "

 

"But you haven't, so leave off and eat some breakfast.  Don't worry, I'm not going to run amuck.  I'm just tired."

 

"The sooner we sort this out, the happier I'll be," Bill muttered.

 

"No arguments."

 

His own appetite was non-existent, but he drank some tea and brooded while Bill worked his way through eggs, bacon and toast.  Harry was now growing steadily more agitated, presumably as whatever potion he'd been given wore off, but just as Ron was debating telling Bill this, the distant sense of alarm peaked ... and faded out.

 

Bill stopped chewing, staring at Ron's face.  "What?"

 

" _What_ what?"

 

"Something's wrong - and don't try to tell me it's not, you should see your expression.  Is it Harry?"

 

There didn't seem to be much point in denying it.  "I reckon they've given him another knock-out potion."

 

Bill blinked.  "How can you tell?"

 

"Because I could feel him going nuts, and then it just stopped," Ron said irritably.

 

"You know we're going to sort this out and get him out of there, don't you?" Bill said after a long moment.

 

Irrationally, this just made Ron angry.  "Really?  You can guarantee it?"

 

"Ron - "

 

"Don't make promises you can't keep," Ron told him, and he turned away from Bill's stricken face.

 

There - it was out in the open.  His biggest fear about this situation, the one that had been riding him ever since they'd failed to escape the day before, was that they might not be able to undo whatever the trap-spell had done to him and Harry, and that Harry would end up staying in St. Mungo's indefinitely.

 

And Ron couldn't think of a thing to do that would prevent it.

 

~~~

 

Kingsley sent Ron away as soon as he walked into the office.

 

"You're suspended," he said when Ron tried to protest, and his tone admitted no defiance.  "Go home - really, why don't you go home to the Burrow and visit your mother?  There's nothing you can do here for now, and we'll contact you as soon as we discover anything."

 

"Bad idea," Bill said wryly, and he and Ron exchanged brief understanding looks.  "Mum doesn't need to see him like this, Kingsley.  You should try to get some sleep if you can," he told his brother, concerned.  "Or if you can't sleep, why don't you go and see Hermione?  She's probably worried sick."

 

Was she?  Whether she was or not, Ron knew better than to try to speak to her until she was ready.  She had to be furious over his actions the day before; better to let her calm down.  Especially as he didn't really want to see her just yet anyway.  He wasn't ready to deal with the turmoil this situation had turned his personal life into.

 

But he had to say something to satisfy Bill and Kingsley, so he nodded.  "Yeah, okay, maybe I'll do that when I've had a bit of kip.  Just ... keep me updated, all right?"

 

"You'll be the first to know when we find anything," Kingsley said with a nod.  Then he drew something out of his pocket and held it out.  "Your spare wand - you'll probably need it to get home.  Don't get too excited," he warned, seeing Ron's face.  "I've placed certain limitations on it.  For example, it certainly won't get you past the security measures at St. Mungo's."

 

"Please, feel free not to trust me," Ron said, shoving the wand up his sleeve irritably.

 

"It's not a matter of trust, Weasley."

 

"Yeah, yeah."

 

Ignoring the stares of his colleagues, Ron stalked out of the office.  For all that he made a grand exit, though, he didn't know where the devil he was going to go.  'Home to get some sleep' was a joke; even flying high on potions, Harry was a restless presence at the edge of his awareness.  His own muscles tensed and jumped at random moments in response to his friend's agitation.

 

In the end, remembering that he hadn't had any breakfast and was now starting to feel a little hollow, Ron paid a quick visit to Gringotts then stopped off at the Lovely Buns Bakery in Diagon Alley and bought some croissants which he took back to his flat. 

 

He was listlessly making tea when someone rapped smartly on his front door.  Wondering who the devil would be visiting him so early in the day, Ron warily opened the door a crack and stared like a goldfish at the person standing on his doorstep.

 

"Professor McGonagall!"

 

"Mr. Weasley," the headmistress said coolly.  "I'm glad to see your powers of observation are as powerful as ever.  I don't wish to be rude, but it's customary to invite guests inside and I've no wish to provide entertainment for your neighbours."

 

"Oh – ah – of course!  Please come in."  Ron stepped back, holding the door open.  Wondering if his week could possibly get any more bizarre, he asked, "Can I offer you a cup of tea?  And - and a fresh croissant?"

 

She looked at him over the top of her little spectacles and a ghost of a smile touched her otherwise stern lips.  "That would be very nice."

 

It might be shabby but the kitchen was at least clean and tidy, and he wasn't too embarrassed to offer her a seat at the table there while he poured the tea and found a fresh jar of his mother's raspberry jam to go with the croissants.

 

"Not that I'm unhappy to see you, Professor, but – " he began.

 

"But you're wondering what in the world could bring me of all people to your door after so long," she finished for him.  Slicing her croissant neatly, Professor McGonagall spread the pieces with jam, laid her knife tidily on the side of her plate, and took a tiny sip of her tea.  "Ah!  I'm pleased your mother taught you the right way to make tea at least!"

 

"Er …"

 

"Eat your croissant, Mr. Weasley.  You won't help Mr. Potter by starving yourself."

 

Ron stared at her, shocked.  "How do you know about Harry?"

 

The look she gave him in return was oddly searching.  "I know because you told me about it yourself three years ago."  She picked up a slice of croissant and paused to add, "Give or take a few hours."

 

"Three … three _years_ ago?"

 

"I'll say no more until you've eaten your croissant and drunk your tea.  We have time for that."

 

The emphasis she put on the word _time_ struck him as being significant, but Ron knew only too well that she was a woman of her word, so he applied himself hastily to his belated breakfast.  When the final crumb was gone from his plate and he'd refilled both of their cups, the headmistress nodded approvingly and took a crisp parchment envelope out of her pocket and placed it in front of him.

 

"Read it," she instructed him.  As he pulled it open, bemused, and took out the sheet of paper inside, she added, "It's a copy.  I followed the instructions and destroyed the original."

 

None of which made any sense to Ron, but he obediently unfolded the paper and saw that it was a letter written in green ink and in her own unmistakable handwriting.  It was dated that day and wasn't long.  When he was done, Ron looked at Professor McGonagall and shook his head, bewildered.

 

"I don't understand."

 

"You gave me that letter three years ago," she told him.  "Mr. Potter was with you."

 

"Professor … I've only seen you once since I left school, and that was in January when I came to check on your Time-Turner.  This time three years ago … well I'd have to check my diaries, but I think I was just finishing my training in Aberystwyth.  I didn't go anywhere near Hogwarts."

 

"Not yet," she said cryptically.

 

"Not yet?  Professor - "

 

Professor McGonagall reached into her pocket again and this time brought out a small leather trimmed box of the type used by jewellers.  It was old and worn, and Ron felt a tingle of recognition as she opened it and drew out a pendant on a long gold chain.  Sunlight from the kitchen window made the crystal heart of the tiny hourglass sparkle.

 

"You'll remember this, of course," she said, setting it gently on the table between them.

 

Ron's mouth went slightly dry.  "I believe you're in breach of Section 3, Paragraph 8, of the Temporal Control Act 1902," he managed.

 

"That depends on whether you believe the device to be insecure at the present moment," she retorted.  "Despite the presence of this bauble, Mr. Weasley, we don't have time to debate the matter, so I'll explain.  Three years ago to this day, I was going about my business at the school when you and Mr. Potter paid me a visit.  When I say "you and Mr. Potter", I don't refer to the you who was finishing his training in Aberystwyth at that moment or the equivalent Mr. Potter, wherever he was.  I refer to you and Mr. Potter of today.  You carried with you two objects, one of which – it's obvious, I think – was this Time-Turner, which you told me I gave to you three years hence.  The other was the original copy of the letter you hold in your hand, which as you have already seen is from me to myself, vouching for the two of you and asking my past self to render you the assistance you required."

 

Ron's first staggered reaction was to assume this was all complete nonsense, or, worse, a set-up of some kind.  Then common sense reasserted itself.  The one feature of this that rendered it utterly plausible was Professor McGonagall, for she simply didn't lend herself to jokes, pranks or deviousness.

 

Then he went cold all over.  Time-travel.  Merlin, Mordred and Morgana …

 

"Professor, why did we do it?  Did we tell you?"

 

"You did," she said, and she took a slow breath.  "But I think we're treading on dangerous enough ground already.  The rest must come from you yourself."

 

Ron began to feel the panic rising up in him yet again, and he shook his head helplessly.  "I don't know!  Why would we do something that mad?  And besides – Harry's in the secure wing at St. Mungo's and I don't have a hope in hell of getting him out of there, let alone taking him on a trip into the past!"

 

Professor McGonagall considered him for a long moment.  Then she said, "If you _could_ get him out of there, Mr. Weasley, what would you do then?"

 

"Try to work out what the curse has done to us," Ron said promptly.

 

She nodded.  "Indeed."

 

"But why would we go to you at Hogwarts?"

 

A sigh.  "Kingsley tells me you're the most promising young Auror he's mentored in some years, so I can only assume this obtuseness is a result of this curse.  _Think_ , Mr. Weasley.  If this had happened to anyone but you and Harry, how would you investigate it?"

 

"Go back to the file," he said, "except that the file's with Kingsley and Bill, and they won't let me help."

 

The headmistress had given him all the pointers she was going to, it seemed.  She sat back in her chair, folded her hands in her lap and regarded him steadily, waiting.

 

"So I need to find another source of information," Ron said, wishing that he didn't feel so woolly and stupid.  Then he had a lightbulb moment.  "The library at Hogwarts!"

 

Professor McGonagall inclined her head.  "We're in the middle of the summer holiday, and three years ago today not only was it a week when all of the teachers were absent, but Madam Pince also took an unprecedented week's leave of absence to visit a friend on the Isle of Wight."

 

The woolly clouds began to recede from his mind.  "Harry said something to me – it seemed significant yesterday, so I asked Kingsley, but I can't work out why."

 

"What was it?" she prompted gently.

 

"He asked me who owned the house.  Kingsley said it probably still belonged to the original owners …"  Ron squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, pummelling his brain.  Something slid into place - it was a feeble link, but it was the only possible link he had.  "The last owner could have been the first victim - a victim of his own trap-spell.  He's the only person who could have set the room up like that, after all."  He opened his eyes again and saw the headmistress's smile.  "Okay, that's somewhere to start," he admitted.  "Look up the Pomeroy family and see what was going on with them.  But that still doesn't get Harry out of St. Mungo's."

 

"You're an Auror, Mr. Weasley, surely you should be able to bluff your way inside?"

 

Ron thought it would probably be more on a par with breaking into Azkaban under the circumstances.  And even so – "Kingsley's taken my main wand and put limitations on my spare," he said bitterly.  "If I had full use of my wand …"

 

"The lack of a fully functioning wand can be overcome," Professor McGonagall said briskly, and she sat up.  "Courage and a cool head are what's required here, Mr. Weasley, not despair!  Now, let me show you how this Time-Turner works.  The mechanism is delicate and jumping years rather than hours requires a special technique."

 

~~~

 

In spite of the time constraints, Ron made himself carry out one extra task before he set out to rescue Harry.  He visited Hermione's flat.

 

Not knowing how his plans would work out, his intention was to leave her a letter.  He certainly wasn't expecting to find her at home in the middle of a working day, but when he stepped out of the Floo (conscious of relief that hadn't reset her wards after everything that had happened), he found her sitting in her little living room, cradling a cup of tea in her hands and staring blankly out of the window.

 

For a moment they stared at each other, startled, then Hermione drew in a shaky breath.

 

"Hello," she said quietly.

 

Wrong-footed, Ron dithered on the hearthrug.  "Hi."

 

"How are you?" she asked, just as though he was a family member she hadn't seen in a few months.

 

"Pretty crap, all things considered."  Ron hesitated, then remembered that he didn't have much time to waste.  Perhaps it was better this way.  "I wasn't expecting to find you here."

 

"No, I suppose not."  She looked down at her mug.  "I've taken a day off.  I needed time to think about things."  She looked up at him again, and her eyes were concerned.  "I went to the Ministry this morning.  Kingsley said he'd suspended you until he and Bill could make further investigations."

 

"Yeah."  What he was about to do was a bad idea, Ron knew, but - this was Hermione.  He'd never kept things from her before, anymore than Harry had it seemed.  "Don't think that's going to help much, to be honest.  And while they're poking around, Harry's stuck in St. Mungo's, and you can't tell me that's going to do him any good."

 

"Yes.  That's been bothering me too."

 

He blinked.  "It has?"

 

She gave him a slightly impatient look at this.  "Ron, whatever else has happened, this is still Harry and you involved.  You don't really think I don't care about what you're going through, do you?"

 

"I think you ought to be bloody pissed off with the pair of us, to be honest," he admitted.

 

"Well I was for a while," she agreed, "but I've been thinking and thinking and ... it's clarified a few things for me."  She put her mug down and stood up, rubbing her hands on the seat of her jeans nervously.  "What are your plans?"

 

"What are you going to do if I tell you?"

 

"I'm not about to tell Kingsley, if that's what you're wondering!" Hermione said rather sharply.  Then she sighed.  "No, sorry - that was a fair question.  But I'm not going to tell him or anyone else, and I don't think I'm going to try to stop you either, so - I suppose you're going to try and get Harry out of St. Mungo's.  They have him in the secure section of the Janus Thickey Ward."

 

"How do you know that?" Ron demanded.

 

"Tony told me, of course.  They're not letting him treat Harry, but I think his credit must be pretty good with some of the senior healers because they're keeping him informed, even though he's not considered to be Harry's next of kin."

 

"Great."  Ron couldn't suppress the sour note in his voice, and from the twist of her mouth Hermione hadn't missed it either.  "Well, that makes things a bit more difficult."

 

Hermione went to the mantelpiece and picked something up.  "Especially without this."

 

It was his wand.  Ron stared at her in mute astonishment, which doubled when she showed him Harry's as well.

 

"Hermione - "

 

"Kingsley gave them both to me for safekeeping," she said matter-of-factly, and a quirk of amusement crossed her face for a split-second.  "I think he thought you might try to break into his office and steal them or something.  It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that I might give them to you instead.  But I suppose he doesn't know me as well as he knows you - he thinks I'm an honest, law-abiding citizen."

 

Not knowing what else to say, Ron ventured a tiny joke.  "You say that like it's a bad thing."

 

It was the right thing to say and they both laughed a little.  Then Hermione held out the wands.  "Go on, take them.  You'll need them.  Just - just promise me you'll get this straightened out somehow, Ron."

 

Ron's amusement faded.  "Hermione - I don't know if I can," he said, and the enormity of what he had to do rose up and nearly overwhelmed his resolve.

 

She saw his face and her own resolve faltered.  A second later she was hugging him tightly and Ron was torn between the desire to just hold onto her and let the world go to hell, and the new and uncomfortable urge to thrust her away from him because she suddenly felt entirely _wrong_ in his arms  He didn't have to make a decision either way; after a moment, she reluctantly released him and took a step back.

 

"I felt that," she said with quiet resolve.

 

"Hermione, no - I didn't - I don't want - it's this damn _thing_ that's got a hold on me and Harry," he burst out.

 

"I know."  She touched his cheek gently and gave him a wavering smile.  "But be honest, Ron - it's not just that, is it?  I think we've both known that for a while now."

 

Bewildered, he stared at her.  "Hermione?"

 

She took his hands and led him over to a chair.  "I know you don't have much time, but I think we need to talk and under the circumstances ... well, I don't think it can wait."

 

 **Back to the Beginning**

 

The stairs Tony had directed them to were narrow, cool and dark.  Ron locked the door behind them, then melted the lock and handle with a hex to hold off their pursuers a little longer, before hurrying after Harry.  "Mind your step," he said, hearing his friend's uncertain footfalls.  "I don't need you breaking your neck on top of everything else!"

 

"Worry about what happens when we leave the building," Harry retorted.  "Do you have a plan?"

 

"Yeah.  We're not leaving the building."

 

"What?"

 

"Well, not straight away," Ron amended.  "If you see a window, stop there, okay?  I could do with a bit more light for this."

 

"This stairwell could do with a few more windows, that's for sure," Harry grumbled, and Ron wanted to laugh simply because it was so good to have Harry back and more or less his usual self.

 

The first sounds of hammering at the door above him killed the mood somewhat.

 

"Forget the window," Ron said.  "Hold up, mate!  _Lumos -_ "  There was barely enough room for the two of them to stand on the same step, but they needed to be pretty close anyway.  Ron grabbed Harry's arms and pulled them around his waist.  "Hold on tight!"

 

Harry blinked up at him and gave him a quirky half-smile.  "Is this the moment?" he asked quizzically.

 

In spite of the need to hurry, Ron raised an eyebrow in return.  "There'll never be a better one," he replied.

 

"Oh, in that case - "  Harry reached up and kissed him.

 

This time Ron was half-expecting it, but the joy of it still struck him like a hammer-blow.  Fortunately for them both, before he could forget himself entirely there was a loud crash from above.  He pulled away hastily and yanked on the fine gold chain inside his collar, dragging the Time-Turner out.  Harry's eyes widened.

 _"Ron!"_

 

"Hold on to me, mate!"

 

Throwing the chain around Harry's neck as well as his own, Ron gripped the little hourglass as Professor McGonagall had shown him, and gave it three full strong turns.  The hourglass began to spin.

 

Reality blurred around them.

 

Ron had never used a Time-Turner before and didn't know what to expect.  There was a strange distorted moment when everything seemed to slow down and the sounds of people running down the stairs became stretched out and distended … then it snapped back like an overstretched rubberband ... everything narrowed to a tiny pinprick of focus ... the air seemed to go thin ... their heartbeats spaced out to a point where he was afraid they might stop completely ...

 

And with a rush of air and a pop, they were back where they started, still crushed together on the same stair.  Their pursuers were gone and in their place was a strong smell of fresh paint.  On the wall just behind Harry's head Ron could see a small sign saying _Caution! Refurbishment In Progress_ that hadn't been there before.

 

For a moment neither of them breathed.

 

Then Harry let out a shuddering sigh.  "Oh my God.  What have you done?"

 

Ron pulled the chain from around his neck and tucked it and the Time-Turner back inside his shirt.  "The only thing I could do.  I bought us time."

 

"Ron - "

 

Ron put his hand over Harry's mouth. "Argue with me later.  We still need to get out of here, preferably without being seen."

 

When he removed it, Harry glared at him.  "Later?  And when will that be?"

 

"Hopefully about fifteen minutes from now," Ron said ruefully.

 

"And any chance you could tell me when _now_ is exactly?"

 

"Three years earlier than it was about thirty seconds ago."

 

Harry's eyes were close to popping out.  "Three years?  You jumped us _three years_ back in time?"  For a moment his mouth opened and closed uselessly as he tried to think of something to say.  Finally, he said very weakly, "Oh my God, Ron.  _Why?_ "

 

"There's a bit of a story attached to that, but can we please get out of here first?  I'm pretty sure neither of us was – is – near St. Mungo's today, but we don't need to run into anyone we know either."

 

It took a moment, but Harry eventually seemed to accept this and nodded.  "Do you really have a plan?"

 

"Yeah.  Let's find somewhere a bit off the beaten track where we can get a coffee and something to eat, and I'll explain."

 

~~~

 

Wizard premises in London weren't limited to Diagon Alley, but most of the others were out of the way and nothing to write reviews about in the _Daily Prophet_.  On the other hand, they were also far less likely to be patronised by people Ron and Harry knew.  The shop Ron headed for was typical of its kind; an average Muggle-style pub from the front, it had been magically expanded internally to accommodate not only a small tavern/restaurant/hostelry like the Leaky Cauldron, but also a wizard grocer and apothecary shop, a self-service café, a public Floo point and a tiny Owl Office.  Colloquially this kind of establishment known as a corner-market, and this one bore the unpromising name of The Limping Troll.

 

"Look, this is the only way we can access the information we need to do the research into this curse," Ron said, when he'd got them a drink and a sausage roll each and they'd taken a small corner table in the otherwise empty café.  "Don't look at me like that!  Believe me, I felt the same way you do at first, but it's about as logical as anything I've seen in a week.  You're out of St. Mungo's and no one's going to be chasing after us here, because no one will ever think of it.  We can use the library and archive at Hogwarts because old Pincey's out of the way for once, and if we absolutely have to we can go back to Pomerai Lodge, because it'll still be intact.  And we don't have to hurry."

 

"We just have to keep out of sight of anyone who knows us," Harry retorted, "and that includes ourselves!"

 

"I think we can be pretty sure we'll manage that," Ron said dryly.  "I don't remember running into myself, anyway."

 

"Dammit, how can you of all people be so flippant about this?  What the hell happens if we slip up and change something?"

 

"Harry," Ron said as levelly as he could, "it's _done_.  We're here.  We're just going to have to be as careful as we possibly can.  I'm not planning to hang around indefinitely, after all.  We've got a specific mission here – we need to track down information about the person who set up that bloody trap-spell, and find out what the curse did to us and why."

 

Harry slumped back in his chair, not happy but looking fairly resigned.  Ron felt that he could settle for this, which was preferable to the angrily resistant Harry he'd dragged into the café, and infinitely better than the dangerously unbalanced Harry who'd spent an uncomfortable night in St. Mungo's.

 

"How are you feeling?" he asked, when Harry finally gave in and began to sip the latte he'd bought for him.

 

"Surprisingly sane, all things considered," Harry admitted, in a milder tone.  "Which is amazing when you think about it.  I'm perfectly aware that I've been off my head for days, you know."

 

"Where did you go when I dropped you off at the Flooport?" Ron asked curiously.

 

"Into the Flooport, of course.  I was a bit jumpy at that point, but it wasn't until you drove off and I tried to check in that I … well, I sort of lost it, I suppose.  I just couldn't make myself do it, so I thought maybe I'd go for a walk, maybe get a drink or something, and try to calm down."  Harry hesitated, and Ron could see his fingers clenching and unclenching around his mug.  "I ended up wandering around London for a couple of days, and for the life of me I can't remember everywhere I went or what I did.  I couldn't stop or sit down, I just wanted to keep moving.  Then I ended up outside Tony's building and I sort of remembered that he lived there, so I went up to his flat.  Only that didn't work out too well, so I ended up spending the night at Grimmauld Place.  The next morning I hung around there for a while until I suddenly …"  He frowned for a moment.  "I can't explain it, but I suddenly knew that you were looking for me and the next thing I knew I was Apparating into your flat.  And then you turned up."

 

"Goldstein said you wigged out on him – you didn't want to be touched."  Ron grimaced.  "I did pretty much the same thing to him and Hermione."

 

"I didn't mean to, I just … didn't want him to touch me."

 

There was a strained pause, then Ron gave in and asked the question that had been bothering him ever since the fateful meeting in the canteen.  "Why didn't you tell me about you and him?"

 

Dull red washed up Harry's neck and face.  "I meant to," he admitted.  "I was going to tell you while we were in Devon – right up until you pulled that crap about Ginny."  He gave Ron a look that was an odd mixture of guilt and exasperation.  "I thought if you were still harping on about that, you might not be all that receptive after all."

 

Ron wanted to say _I don't get it, why him?_   But he wasn't a complete idiot and knew it was a stupid question to ask.  Harry might quite reasonably ask the same thing of him about Hermione; if the question needed to be asked, then the answer would never shed any light on the matter.  So instead he asked, "How long?"

 

Harry shrugged.  "Over a year and a half now."

 

He was shocked.  "And you never said anything?  Harry!"

 

"Well it's not like we live in each other's pockets anymore, is it?" Harry pointed out.  "If we did, you might have noticed without me having to tell you!"

 

"Merlin!"  Ron fiddled with a tiny paper packet of sugar for a moment, then said reluctantly, "It's serious, then.  You love him?"

 

Harry shifted in his seat uneasily.  "I don't know about love.  He's great company and we have a lot of fun together.  I like being with him; I could see us sticking together in the long term."

 

Ron looked up.  "You don't sound too sure about that."

 

"Yeah, well you should have asked me a week ago.  Things were a lot clearer then, weren't they?"

 

That much was undeniable.

 

"Last week I'd have told you we were thinking about living together," Harry said tiredly.  "I've been spending most of my free time with him when I'm in England anyway.  I liked the idea of having a place to come home to for once and him being there.  If I'd told you that, what would you have said?"

 

Ron didn't like to think too closely about that.  He was quite self-aware enough to know that if it had been sprung on him unexpectedly, he probably would have reacted very badly.  "I'd have been a bit pissed off that you were keeping it from me for so long," he said, "and then I'd have explained to Goldstein what would happen to him if he screwed up.  Okay?"  He wasn't sure how true this was, but it sounded good.

 

Harry didn't seem to be fooled, but he didn't seem inclined to make an issue of it either.  "Well, let's hope you get a chance to do that.  What do we do first?"

 

"I'm in two minds about that," Ron admitted.  "We're going to have to go to Hogwarts, whatever happens, because I know we went there.  Besides, if we can't find information on the curse in the school library we're probably screwed, because I can't think of anywhere else that holds as much magical lore as Hogwarts.  But the one thing we could really use is the case file and we don't stand a chance in hell of getting hold of it."

 

Harry considered this.  "The _Daily Prophet_ is supposed to be the oldest magical journal in Europe," he said, "and I know they keep copies of every edition going back hundreds of years.  Those murders would have been reported, so maybe we can find out what we need from the _Prophet_.  Enough to be able to cross-check against the records Hogwarts holds, anyway."

 

"Risky," Ron said doubtfully.  "Although the _Prophet_ 's archive is in Hogsmeade anyway, and not exactly on the tourist route for anyone, so it's less of a risk I suppose.  Okay, let's do it."  He rummaged in a pocket and pulled out a notepad and a tiny, self-inking thrush-feather quill, something all Aurors carried around with them.  "Right, here's what I think.  We need to find out who the first victims were and who the last owner of the house was, because I reckon there's a good chance they're one and the same …"

 

~~~

 

Ron had been right when he said that the newspaper's archives weren't a tourist hot-spot.  The sole employee in the dark and musty facility – most of which was underground – was an unsociable and fussy old wizard who seemed more than a little put out by their visit.  He was even less impressed by their request to search some of the oldest parts of the archive and became so pernickety over use of his ancient card catalogue that Ron was almost ready to give up and leave.

 

Eventually, however, he located references both to the wizard branch of the Pomeroy family and to the murders at Pomerai Lodge, and even agreed to leave the two of them to search through the relevant documents while he went off to make himself a cup of tea.

 

"I think called these 'newspapers' is stretching it a bit," Harry said wryly, carefully sorting through a series of sheets of very elderly parchment.  "They're more like flyers."  The sheets generally bore only one story each, quite fuzzily printed in most cases and worded in highly sensational terms.

 

"Glad to see their standards of journalism haven't slipped," Ron added, holding up one notice bearing the headline "GRINDED LYKE DEDE FLESHE!" and a woodcut image of two Aurors dramatically turning their faces away in horror from assorted severed human limbs dripping blood.

 

"Great.  You don't think our murderer could be Rita Skeeter, do you?"

 

"Nah, can't be - nobody's blaming you or Dumbledore for the deaths in these articles.  What's the earliest date you've got?  I've got one from 1683 here."

 

"This one's from 1542, but it refers to an earlier murder at the house too – oh wait!"  Harry held it up and squinted at the uneven lines of text. " _Fine country mansion_ … blah blah blah … _the goode folk of Bere Pomeroy are being moste fearful for their lives on acounte of the brutal and untimelye end of the warlocke Gervase de Pomerai, head of the Moste Noble House of Pomerai, half an hundred winters afore, thus ending his line amidst much disarray._ "  Harry lowered the sheet and looked at Ron.  "Gervase de Pomerai. That's who we're looking for."

 

~~~

 

"Well," Professor McGonagall said.  "Well."

 

She seemed to be at a loss to know how to react to the two weary wizards standing before her, but after spending some time suspiciously subjecting the letter Ron gave her to all manner of tests and then checking on the security of the Time-Turner in her possession (unsurprisingly, it was still where she had safely left it after Hermione handed it back), she reluctantly accepted the truth of their story.  This did not make her approve of it.

 

"I trust you realise how dangerous this is?" she demanded, and her tone was more than ordinarily sharp.  "If you should meet your other selves or someone else who knows you well enough to know that you shouldn't be here, the consequences could be disastrous!"

 

"We're not intending to stroll around Diagon Alley or visit family, Professor," Harry said, before Ron could respond to this.  "And we've been as careful as we can getting here."

 

"And we're here now because the castle's almost empty and we're unlikely to be seen," Ron added.  "You told me that Madam Pince is away on holiday, so we can use the library without her knowing."

 

Professor McGonagall gave him an exasperated look.  "We're talking about Irma Pince, Ronald.  No matter how careful you are, she'll know _someone_ has been messing around in her library."  But this was a weak objection and she knew it.  "Very well, gentlemen, it seems I have no choice but to assist you.  I'll give you the necessary keys to the library and Restricted Section.  But you must be careful, and I advise you not to stay here too long.  Also …"  She sighed and the annoyance faded from her face, leaving her looking at them with a familiar expression of concern only partially hidden under her usual astringency.

 

"Professor?" Harry said, his brow furrowing.

 

"Time-travel exacts a toll on the traveller, Mr. Potter, as Miss Granger discovered to her cost when you were children.  _She_ was only jumping an hour at a time.  Three years, however … well, take my word for it - it shows in your faces.  And from your stories, I understand you were both already sleep-deprived and worn down before you came here."  She tutted and shook her head.  "I'll have the house-elves make up two beds in Gryffindor Tower and send up some food.  Rest and recover a while before you start searching the library."

 

Ron was about to protest when he looked at Harry and saw what the Headmistress meant.  There was a certain greyness and translucency about his skin, dark smudges under his eyes, and all in all he looked exhausted.  And at the same moment that Ron realised just how tired _he_ was.

 

"Good idea," he said instead.

 

They made their way through eerily empty corridors to Gryffindor Tower.  The Fat Lady was nowhere to be seen - possibly she had taken a holiday herself in another painting somewhere - but the portrait hole swung open at a touch and there was the familiar Gryffindor Common Room with its red and gold furnishings. 

 

Harry insisted on taking a shower while they waited for the house-elves to sort out their accommodation; Ron was initially disinclined, but then he remembered spending most of the previous night  in his clothes and changed his mind.  It didn't wake him up at all, but it did make him feel a lot more human.

 

When he emerged, Harry was standing in their old dormitory next to his former, now freshly-made, bed.  He was wearing a towel slung around his hips and rubbing another over his hair, and frowning myopically without his spectacles.

 

"What's up?" Ron asked, following his example and towelling off briskly.

 

"Nothing - I'm just pissing out all those bloody potions they gave me in St. Mungo's, I think."

 

"How do you know?"

 

"Don't ask.  Did we get the antidote from Tony, though?  I don't think I need it, but I'm still a bit - you know - fuzzy now and then."

 

"You probably just need sleep." Ron yawned until he heard his jaw crack.  "I feel like I could sleep for a month myself.  Is there any grub?"

 

"In the common room," Harry said, amused, then he hissed.  "Merlin, Ron!  Is that the scar from that injury you took a few months ago?"

 

"What?"  Ron glanced down at himself .  His towel had slipped, revealing the ugly claw-marks across his right hip and lower belly.  "Oh - yeah.  I thought you'd seen it already."

 

"I wasn't looking the last time I saw you without clothes," Harry retorted.  "It barely looks healed!  Why hasn't it healed properly?"

 

"You know why," he said reasonably.  "Dark magic - it wasn't a real manticore, it was a construct.  It looks worse than it is, you know."  Then he had to suck in his breath, for Harry was touching it with light fingers and …

 

Ron grabbed at Harry to steady himself.  There was a sudden surge of some feeling between them, as though something once again was being transferred, only this time it was from Harry into Ron.  The scars began to sting where his fingers rested on Ron's hip and to Ron's amazement the ugly raw slashes twisted, pulsed … and slowly faded away until nothing was left but pink new skin that subsided into paler lines even as he watched.

 

Realising that he was still holding his breath, Ron let it out in a shuddering sigh.  "What did you just do?"

 

Harry snatched his hand back and stared at it.  "I don't know!"

 

"You healed them …"  Ron brushed his own fingers over the marks and was amazed when all he felt was a normal touch, not the sharp discomfort the scars had been giving him for months when his clothes rubbed or he forgot and bumped himself.  "Bloody hell, mate, you healed them!"

 

"But I didn't do anything!"

 

Ron stared at him, his brain in a whirl.  "Back at St. Mungo's," he said slowly.  "You were almost out of it on a Pacifying Draught, but when I touched you it felt like something was pulled out of me and then you started to come around.  Goldstein noticed too.  And I've spent over twenty-four hours feeling you doing stuff - I knew every time they gave you a new potion and every time it wore off."

 

"Yeah, I could feel you getting upset and angry, it was doing my head in," Harry said.  He puffed out a breath.  "That curse has linked us together somehow and it's allowing us to share energy.  But what for?"

 

"I don't know," Ron admitted, "but I don't mind admitting I'm grateful for it."  He gestured at the scars.  "I thought I was going to be stuck with them like that for the rest of my life, and it was bugging me a bit if I'm honest.  Makes you be careful about all sorts of stuff."

 

"Such as?"

 

"Sex for a start," he said bluntly.  "It's a bit awkward when the other person has to be careful how they touch your hip and stomach."  He began to towel his hair again.

 

"You didn't say anything to me," Harry said in a stricken tone.

 

Ron paused and blinked at him.  "Well, you _did_ say it needed to be a bit rough," he pointed out, deliberately good-humoured.  "I reckon Ishtar got full payment that time."

 

"But - "

 

He sighed and looked at Harry affectionately.  "Look, don't sweat it!  It wasn't _that_ bad.  Besides, I didn't really notice at the time, I was being distracted by something else."  Harry's expression became even more tense and anxious, and Ron decided it was time for a little honesty between them.  "Look, mate, when we were stuck in that damn trap-spell I knew having sex with me was the last thing you wanted.  It was written all over your face.  But it didn't occur to me until I found out about you and Goldstein that there might be a different reason to the one I was thinking.  So if you're hung up on the idea that having sex with you was a horrible experience for me - lose it, okay?  I'm not so insecure in my masculinity or whatever that having sex with a bloke is going to be a problem for me, especially not when it's you.  I'm not saying I'm gay, because I'm not, but so long as I'm not being pinned down and raped, I'm saying - " he hesitated, then shrugged.  "I'm saying it's all good, that's all.  Because it was."

 

Harry stared at him blankly for a moment, then said, "So what's your problem with me and Tony?"

 

Somewhat less comfortable at this, Ron had to look away.  "I don't know.  Must just be him, I s'pose."

 

He thought Harry might challenge this, but after a moment his friend turned away and began to pull his clothes on.  "Come on, let's eat and get some sleep.  We're not out of the woods yet, we've got a lot of research to do."

 

"Okay," Ron said, but Harry's lack of reaction disappointed him for some reason.

 

~~~

 

Ron had plenty of memories of spending all night in the school library as a teenager, especially during the run-up to their OWLs when sometimes it seemed like the whole fifth year was camped out there night after night, frantically trying to cram in as much revision as possible.

 

It was a little different finding the place utterly empty, even of Madam Pince's forbidding presence.  There had always been _someone_ there after all, even if it was just a couple of solitary seventh years, looking up obscure references for their NEWTs papers.

 

With a couple of hours' sleep under his belt, Harry was all business.  "Okay.  I reckon we need to dig out some history books for the fifteenth century and see if there's any reference made to Gervase de Pomerai and the kind of stuff he was into.  And we need to go over trap-spells and uses of the Circle of Ishtar too."

 

"Yes, Hermione."

 

"Hey, I'm not your fiancée!  I'm pretty sure I know which reference texts we'll need for the trap-spells, and they'll all be in the Restricted Section - want me to get those while you check out the history section?"

 

"Yeah, okay.  There should be a copy of _Great Wizarding Events of the Fifteenth Century_ as well," Ron said.  "It'd be interesting to see what kind of impact the end of the House of Pomerai had, especially since he got splatted in the process."

 

"I'll meet you back at our old table," Harry said, waving a hand at the table they'd always headed for with Hermione when they were at school.  He disappeared off into the depths of the stacks and after a moment Ron followed his example.

 

As he pulled books from the shelves, flicked through them and put them back, Ron found himself dwelling on Harry and wishing he'd made a greater effort to spend time with his friend over the past couple of years.  While it was impossible to put a finger on any one thing that had changed between them, he was only now beginning to realise the extent of the gap that had somehow opened up in their friendship.  It shouldn't be possible that Hermione had known things about Harry, important things like him being gay, that Ron didn't know too and it wasn't right that he could have been in a full-blown relationship with Anthony Goldstein of all people for well over a year and Ron know nothing about it.  It showed with uncomfortable clarity how blind he'd become, how unwilling he'd been to notice anything different in his friend or to even make an effort to see him more often.  These things couldn't have gone unnoticed if they hadn't drifted apart, and while Ron was now realising that Harry had probably deliberately allowed it to happen to some degree, that didn't absolve him of unwittingly colluding in the deception.

 

Worse, he was beginning to realise that Harry might not have done this willingly.  There was an overtone to their interactions now that made it clear that something else was going on with his friend, something he was reluctantly hiding from Ron.  As though every time he failed to get the reaction he hoped for, he gently withdrew just a little. 

 

Ron was beginning to think he knew what Harry was hoping for - he just needed to decide what to do about it.

 

~~~

 

Harry emerged from the Restricted Section to find Ron surrounded by a stack of weighty histories, to which he added his own pile of reference books.

 

"Find anything useful?" he asked, taking a seat next to his friend and pulling the most likely of the trap-spell books toward him.

 

"I'll let you know in about a year's time," Ron said wryly, gesturing to his book pile.  "These are all the ones with references to the de Pomerai family in the index.  You?"

 

"The same," Harry admitted.  "Trap-spells aren't all that common these days, but they used to be quite popular.  The double-trigger part is probably something de Pomerai came up with himself, though.  If it was him."

 

"I don't think there's much doubt about that.  There's a big bit about the first murders in _Great Wizarding Events of the Fifteenth Century_ and that's definitely when Gervase de Pomerai died.  Most of it, though - and get this - is about how this great 'master of magicks' ended up being killed by his own apprentice."  Ron tapped the book.  "According to this, he was some kind of experimenter and innovator, and had quite a reputation for being the big wizard of the local area.  He held a position with the International Confederation of Wizards at some point, although it's not clear why he stepped down.  And he wasn't all that old when he died - maybe sixty at most, which is nothing really."

 

"What about the apprentice?" Harry asked, interested.  "Who was he?  Or she?"

 

"He," Ron said.  "Wizards didn't mentor witches in those days, or vice versa.  It doesn't say who he was though, only that he'd been with de Pomerai for quite a while.  I'll keep digging."

 

"Okay.  I'm going to try and work out what was going on with the Circle of Ishtar, because from what I can see the trap-spell part was fairly straightforward.  They're pretty easy to adapt if you know what you're doing, so I'm starting to think this trap was just that - a trap, intended to get us into the Circle and hold us there until we did whatever _that_ wanted."

 

"Was it something an apprentice wizard could set up, do you think?" Ron asked.

 

"Define an apprentice wizard."

 

"Well, he probably hadn't left school long."

 

"So he'd be starting to come into his full powers but still be pretty raw?"  Harry shook his head.  "I couldn't have set up something like this when I was seventeen, Ron.  This is the kind of stuff you only come up against when you've been out in the world a while."

 

"But if he was unusually bright?  A bit of a Dumbledore?" Ron suggested, then he shook his head.  "No.  A wizard like Dumbledore comes along once a century maybe.  Someone like Hermione, then?"

 

"Come off it, you're the Auror here, Ron!" Harry protested.  "You said yourself that de Pomerai was the great experimenter.  If you offered me two wizards, one a green apprentice and the other an experienced wizard who likes to dabble, then showed me a really complicated spell set-up that killed the pair of them, I'm going to say the older wizard set it up.  And so are you, because it's the only explanation that makes sense of the evidence."

 

"But would an experienced older wizard die in his own trap that easily?" Ron pointed out.

 

"Yes," Harry said flatly, "because in case you've forgotten, it was leaving the trap without paying it off that made it lethal.  All the apprentice had to do was try to escape."

 

"And why would he do that?"

 

"That's what you need to find out from your books while I try to find out what the spell was supposed to achieve," Harry reminded him.  He grinned at Ron's expression.  "Sorry, mate, you can't escape the research - especially as we don't have Hermione here to help us."

 

"Sounds like you're getting the more interesting end of the deal," Ron grumbled.

 

"Yeah? Well if you've been holding out on me and you know cuneiform, now's the time to tell me," Harry retorted.  "I had to find a dictionary and two grammar texts, just to translate the language the Circles are written in!"

 

~~~

 

They had slept until nearly midnight, and it was dawn before they emerged from their books.  Harry Banished his texts back to their shelves, tucked his copious notes into his pocket, and looked up to find that Ron had wandered off into the stacks at some point.  He got up, rolling his shoulders wearily, and slowly made his way through the library.  Ron was looking something up in Madam Pince's card catalogue.  Harry hoped he knew what he was doing with it.

 

"I'm going to get a drink and stretch my legs," he said.  "Want me to get you anything?"

 

"Thanks - I'll have a cup of tea if you can get one."  Ron looked up for a moment.  "I think I'm nearly done here." 

 

"Yeah, me too."

 

"Good.  I'm just going to put my books back.  Meet you in Gryffindor Tower?"

 

"Okay.  I'll ask the elves to send us up some breakfast, if any of them are around."

 

Unsurprisingly, there were house-elves bustling around the kitchens even at such an early hour and they were only too delighted to make Harry a huge breakfast tray of fresh toasted muffins, butter and jam, and a large pot of tea.  While they were assembling this, he set off for Gryffindor and didn't hurry too much.

 

He was trying not to think too hard about everything he'd read, and in spite of a gut-level desire to keep Ron in sight at all times, he was not looking forward to his arrival at their rendezvous.  He had found the answers he was looking for, but they didn't make him happy and he strongly suspected they would make Ron even unhappier, but he couldn't see a way forward out of the mess they were in.

 

In spite of dawdling, he still beat Ron to the common room by a good ten minutes and he was sitting in the window, staring out at the slowly rising sun, when his friend arrived.

 

"Why didn't you start without me?" Ron asked, grabbing a buttered muffin and taking a bite.

 

"Not very hungry I suppose," Harry admitted.

 

"Well, have some tea at least."  Ron poured it, and held the half-eaten muffin between his teeth as he carried the cups over to the window.  "'Ere oo guh," he said indistinctly.

 

"Cheers.  You're dripping butter."

 

Ron removed the muffin from his mouth and dabbed at the butter on his t-shirt with a spare finger.  "Oh well.  I'm saving it for later, Dad would say."

 

Harry managed a weak smile at this.  "What did you find out?" he asked.

 

"A lot of stuff that just confirmed the entry in _Great Wizarding Events_ , plus one potentially enlightening piece of information," Ron replied.  "What about you?"

 

"You first," Harry evaded.

 

"Okay."  Ron finished his muffin in two bites, and took a slurp of tea.  "Gervase de Pomerai was probably homosexual.  There's nothing that explicitly says so, but he never married, had no children, legitimate or otherwise, and he was known to enjoy the company of handsome young men.  That kind of thing tended to be noticed in those days, and it must have been pretty obvious because it was mentioned in practically every article about him.  He was also known to enjoy the occasional walk on the Dark side, magically, and that seems to be why he was dismissed from the International Confederation of Wizards."  He took another sip of tea.  "Your turn."

 

Harry put his cup down on the window cill.  The tea wasn't doing anything to cure the dryness of his mouth.  "Do you want the bad news, or the bad news?"

 

There was a pause. 

 

"I think I already guessed it wasn't going to be good," Ron said.  "We can't break this, can we?"  Harry shook his head.  "Okay.  Tell me."

 

"I don't think it was intended for evil purposes," Harry said, finding it easier to speak now that the worst part was said.  "I know that sounds weird, considering what you just told me, but if everything I read is right, and I got the translations right, then I don't think he meant it to do harm, even if the methods he used were … dodgy."

 

"Dark wizard," Ron reminded him.

 

"I know.  But the Circle of Ishtar doesn't work that way, Ron.  It _can't_ work that way.  Remember what Ishtar symbolises - love, sex, fertility."

 

"War," Ron said rather dryly.

 

"Or conflict, to be more specific," Harry corrected him.  "And that's important, because magically the Circle of Ishtar was originally created to resolve dangerous conflicts - through marriage.  Two people who weren't necessarily keen on each other were brought together in marriage for the greater good.  The Circle of Ishtar would be written around the marital bed on their wedding night to seal the contract and bind them together.  The binding was on a fairly deep level, making them unusually aware of each other.  It made it very difficult for one to act against the other's best interests, because they both suffered for it mentally."

 

"So what the devil was de Pomerai thinking when he set this thing up?" Ron demanded. 

 

"I'm getting to that.  The spell started out in eastern countries, but it was brought to Europe around the time of the Crusades and during the Middle Ages it briefly went through a kind of vogue among the wealthier magical families - they thought it added an extra touch of romance to things.  One of the books I was reading quotes someone as saying "it bindeth my heart unto thine" in connection with it."

 

"Yeah, dead romantic," Ron said dryly,  but he was uneasily fascinated.  "What killed its popularity?  The do-it-or-you-die clause?"

 

"That was the trap-spell," Harry reminded him.  "The Circle was never fatal in itself, but the problems started when one person involved wasn't faithful to the other.  Since the other person couldn't help but know on a _very_ intimate level, things tended to get a bit ugly.  Plus - and this is the bit that's relevant to us - the Circle could only be broken by the person who wrote it, and they often had a vested interest in the status quo, so …"

 

"So what you're saying is that only Gervase de Pomerai could free us from this, and he's been dead for about five hundred years."

 

"Yeah," Harry said unhappily.

 

"Well … that's a bugger."  A pause.  "So why did he set it up?"

 

"I think you've answered that question yourself," Harry said.  "He liked young handsome men, and his apprentice died with him.  Obviously, we can never know exactly what happened, but I can speculate.  He wanted to bind the apprentice to him - permanently."

 

"In a kind of marriage," Ron said.

 

"Well ... that's certainly the obvious reason for using that particular spell.  It's pretty much designed for marriages - or sex-based relationships, anyway."

 

"And if we speculate further, the apprentice wasn't quite so keen on the idea and tried to leave.  Bloody hell."  Ron rubbed his face.  "Yeah, but Harry - that can't have been part of the plan, surely?  De Pomerai can't have intended for them both to die!"

 

"Yeah, I know, that puzzles me too."  Harry frowned and picked up his teacup absently, taking a sip.  "Look, there are a couple of ways you can look at it.  One: de Pomerai sets up the Circle and adds the trap-spell because he knows the apprentice won't go through with it otherwise.  But he sets it up incorrectly, and when the apprentice runs it kills them both.  Does that fit with the man you read about?"

 

"Does a trap-spell have to kill?" Ron countered.

 

"No.  Mostly they just contain the target until the correct pay-off is made."

 

"Then no, it doesn't sound like him, because everything I read says he was far too smart to make such a basic mistake."

 

"So then there's option two: he sets up the Circle and adds the trap-spell as … well, call it an inducement or something similar.  He _wants_ the apprentice to go along with the Circle willingly, but he's willing to coerce him with the threat of the trap if he doesn't."

 

"That sounds more like the man I read about.  But it went wrong."

 

"Yes … I'm thinking either the apprentice said "I'd rather die" and deliberately walked out, or de Pomerai decided that if he couldn't have it the way he wanted, he'd rather they both died instead."

 

"Melodrama - yay!" Ron said, and he shook his head.  "Come off it, who would do that, mate?"

 

"Like I said, we'll never know," Harry admitted.  "But the thing about the Circle of Ishtar is it _did_ have that kind of illusion of romance about it at the time.  And according to your books, his apprentice had been with him for a while.  The most unlikely people develop mad passions, Ron - look at Snape and my mum.  It's possible that de Pomerai got really attached to the apprentice and just assumed that he would feel the same way.  When you feel like that, it must hurt like hell to have the other person reject you."

 

For a moment Ron looked at him very intently, then he let out a soft sigh.  "Is that what you think I did to you, mate?"

 

~~~

 

All the colour drained from Harry's face.  "What?"

 

"I know I can be pretty dense sometimes," Ron said, "and I know I've been pretty dense _this_ time.  But with all the evidence that's been shoved under my nose for the past couple of days, I'd have to be a gold-plated moron not to realise that there's more going on here than meets the eye."

 

"I don't know what you're talking about."

 

"Why didn't you tell me you're gay?  You told Hermione, didn't you?"

 

"I didn't think you'd take it very well," Harry said stiffly.

 

"Bollocks," Ron said bluntly.  "You didn't have any problem telling me you were splitting up with my sister, and when I gave you a hard time about it you got in my face and told me what you'd do to me if I didn't just get over it.  You could have done the same thing with this, so why didn't you?  You couldn't honestly think I'd never speak to you again, not after the grand coming out party of Seamus and Dean!"

 

Silence.

 

"Why didn't you tell me about you and Goldstein?" Ron pressed him.  This time Harry only looked away.  "I might not have liked it much at first, Harry, but I'd have got over it because you're my friend!  I want you to be happy!  And that's part of the problem I have with him, because you've been hiding this thing you've got going with him for the better part of two years, which makes me think maybe you're not having as much fun with him as you say you are.  In fact, instead of telling me all about it when you had a brilliant opportunity, you ended up backing away again and leaving it to him to tell me instead - the poor sod!  And let me tell you, he didn't look too happy about it.  Then you try to tell me that you're thinking of living together - "

 

"Oh, give it a rest!" Harry snapped, and he glared at Ron furiously.  "How long have you and Hermione been engaged - five years?  And you're still living in separate flats?  Even your mum keeps wondering when the two of you are going to get a place together!"

 

"That's sort of the point I was getting to," Ron admitted, and he fished in his pocket for something which he held out to Harry.  It was a delicate engagement ring.  Harry stared at it in wordless dismay.  "She gave it back," Ron said, and he tucked it back into his pocket.  "Just before I came to break you out of St. Mungo's.  Said she'd been thinking of doing it for a while, but didn't know how to tell me."

 

"And whose fault is that?" Harry said, but he sounded genuinely upset.

 

"Nobody's," Ron said.  He shrugged a little.  "The right time never happened for us.  I told you - I wasn't ready to settle down and neither was she.  I'm starting to think we stayed together just because it was comfortable.  We were friends, we were fond of each other, the sex was good … but it never developed into anything else.  Probably a bit like you and Goldstein," he added rather pointedly.

 

"Don't you dare try and tell me what my relationship with Tony's like," Harry said, but he sounded tired rather than angry.

 

"All right.  I'll tell you how much I hate the idea of him touching you instead, shall I?"  He saw Harry's eyes widen in surprise, and pressed his advantage.  "Or you could tell me how you really feel about me, and give me a chance to decide if I like the sound of it or not.  You know, instead of deciding for yourself that I'll hate it and there's no point in bothering."

 

"You are a total wanker," Harry told him bitterly.

 

"It takes one to know one."  Ron grabbed him and before Harry could react, he kissed him.

 

Curse or not, it was still the best thing he'd experienced in years.  It felt like they fitted together perfectly; as though something that had been missing from his life was suddenly _there_ and tangible enough to touch, to taste, to hold.  It was fire in his blood.

 

And Harry put up no resistance whatsoever; quite the reverse.  There was a split second when he was rigid with shock, then he was kissing Ron back just as urgently. 

 

There was a faint tinkling crash of breaking china as their cups went flying, but neither of them paid the slightest attention.

 

~~~

 

"This," Harry said a little while later, "does not solve anything, you realise."

 

"It doesn't solve the problem of this bed being too bloody small for two grown men, that's for sure," Ron replied.

 

"Ron ..."

 

"What?"

 

"We're three years in the past and still cursed to spend the rest of our lives together.  And when we get back home there's going to be the whole Auror department and a bunch of healers waiting for us with butterfly nets and a vat of Pacifying Potion.  What the hell are we going to do?"

 

Ron was silent.  He didn't have an answer.

 

"There's more," Harry added, when it was clear that Ron wasn't going to answer him.  "Which I would have told you if we hadn't got sidetracked.  You probably don't remember, but there was an extra element to that Circle of Ishtar - a cauldron spell at the centre of it.  Have you run into those before?"

 

Ron sighed and propped himself up on elbow, smiling wryly.  "Harry.  We're stark-naked here and you want to talk about cauldron spells?"

 

Harry stuck his tongue out at him.  "If you wanted romance, you should have stayed with Hermione!"

 

"In case you've forgotten, Hermione reckons I have the emotional range of a teaspoon."

 

"She said that when we were fifteen," Harry reminded him, then he made a face.  "Ginny didn't think much of my romantic instincts," he admitted. "I forgot Valentine's Day one year."

 

Ron's lips twitched.  "Well, you're on safe ground with me, because I'm more interested in hot, porny sex than romance.  Although I'm up for nice chocolates as well."

 

"Subtle!"

 

"That's me, Auror Subtleness.  So go on, tell me about this cauldron spell."

 

Harry rolled his eyes, but didn't object.  "There was a cauldron spell at the centre of the Circle.  It was a bit out of phase, but I couldn't work out what it was there for, although it was holding energy - "

 

"Hold up a bit," Ron interrupted.  "What do you mean, _out of phase_?"

 

"It wasn't completely there, if you get my meaning - it was like it was only an image of itself or a reflection, not the actual spell, but it was linked to the Circle and trap-spell and there was energy in it - quite a bit of energy, actually."

 

"But if it wasn't completely there, where was it?"

 

"I don't know, but at a guess it was seated in another dimension - another timestream perhaps.  And this is the important bit, Ron - it's possible that's why the curse was still so potent when we entered the house and why the house was still intact.  Because it _wasn't_ there exactly.  It was only half in this dimension, and the other half was in the same place as the cauldron spell."

 

"Oh bugger."  Ron flopped onto his back and covered his eyes.  "Mate, you're making my brain hurt with this 'other dimension' stuff.  Just tell me if the cauldron spell is relevant to us now, yeah?"

 

"It's holding energy," Harry said.  "Probably the energy generated by all the deaths, but I don't think that's what it was intended for.  I think Gervase de Pomerai intended it to hold energy from ... well, sex.  It's inside a Circle of Ishtar, after all."

 

Ron uncovered his eyes and gave Harry a disbelieving look.  "Are you telling me he wanted to bind that apprentice to him so they could have lots of sex and generate a cauldron full of spare energy?  After giving me all that guff about people of unlikely passions, you bloody fraud?!"

 

"The two things don't have to be mutually exclusive, you know," Harry said, exasperated, "and if he was the kind of wizard you say he was, doesn't it sound like something he might do?  Killing two birds with one stone - binding his fancy bit to him _and_ increasing their combined magical strength?"

 

Ron was about to respond to this when he realised what Harry was saying.  "You mean - we can call on all that energy besides our own?"

 

Harry's brows twitched up and a smile began to curl the corner of his mouth.  "Intriguing, don't you think?  Especially since we can add to it whenever we feel like it."

 

"Nice double-entendre!" Ron congratulated him, but his mind was busy with the implications.  "So we don't need a Circle of Ishtar anymore?"

 

"The Circle of Ishtar is part of the cauldron spell, and vice versa, so it's around us permanently now, even though it's not _actually_ around us, if you know what I mean."

 

"I don't, but I'll take your word for it."  Ron pursed his lips for a moment, considering, then shook his head.  "I don't see how it helps us."

 

"It doesn't - or not with the immediate problem, anyway.  It might explain why I healed your scar."

 

"Now _that_ could be useful sometime," Ron acknowledged, "just not right now."  He sighed.  "What we really need is to get Bill and Kingsley on their own and show them the evidence ... only, after breaking you out of St. Mungo's and illegally using a Time-Turner, something tells me they're not going to be a mood to hear it."

 

"The only sure thing is that we can't stay here," Harry said.  "We could ask Professor McGonagall's advice, maybe."

 

"Yeah, but do we want to get her any more involved than we already have?  When she brought me the Time-Turner, I got the impression that we hadn't done more than ask her to let us look in the library.  She didn't seem to know anything about the outcome."

 

"Damn."

 

"Yeah."  Ron sighed again and reluctantly sat up.  "Come on," he said, squeezing Harry's knee.  "Like you said, we can't stay here, whatever happens."

 

~~~

 

The sun was fully up when they left the castle, its light sparkling cleanly on the choppy waters of the lake and a brisk morning breeze whisking around the great meadow that led down to the shore.

 

"What do you want to do?" Harry asked Ron, as they took the broad path to the school gates for lack of any better direction.  "We could hole up somewhere for a while, I suppose, until we work something out."

 

"They way I see it, we've got three choices," Ron said.  "We stay put for the time being - or even the next three years - but that'll be difficult, because we'll risk being seen and recognised, and we won't have any way of supporting ourselves."

 

"We could go Muggle."

 

"Still very risky, 'specially since I'm not much of a Muggle on my best day."

 

Harry had to concede this point.

 

"We could use the Time-Turner to go right back in time and make ourselves a new life in a place where we've never existed before."

 

"And risk changing time," Harry said.

 

"Well ... that's debatable.  If we're in a place where now hasn't happened yet, how will we know if we've changed anything?  Would it even matter?"

 

"Yeah, before we do that, let's go back a couple of years from now and have that discussion with Dumbledore.  I'm sure he'd love to have a philosophical discussion about timestreams with your future self."

 

Ron grinned in spite of himself.  "Wouldn't he, though!"

 

Harry nudged him.  "What's option number three?"

 

They stopped and Ron looked at him.  "We go home and face the music."

 

"I'm not having positive feelings about that one," Harry said as calmly as he could.  "I'm warning you, Ron - I'm not going back to St. Mungo's under any circumstances."

 

"And I'm not going to let that happen.  You know that, right?"

 

"I don't see how you can stop it happening.  You've already admitted that Kingsley and Bill won't be in a listening mood when we get back."

 

"I'm not suggesting we go right back to where we left," Ron said.  "That's just a recipe for disaster.  But like you said, we could hole up somewhere … lie low and wait for things to calm down."  He paused.  "Get used to being a double act and see what we can do with all that stored up energy."

 

Something sparked in Harry's eye at this, but all he said was, "You have somewhere in mind?"

 

"Might have."

 

"Does it involve creepy old houses full of mystery curses?"

 

"Nah.  Been there, done that!"

 

Harry hunched his shoulders, his face full of indecision.  Ron gave him a few minutes, then dug the Time-Turner out of his shirt.  He took Harry by the arm and gently pulled him close, before looping the long chain of the pendant over his head.

 

"Your choice, mate," he said.  "If you'd rather chuck it all in and go someplace else - some other time - then that's fair enough.  I won't blame you if you do, you're the one with the most to lose if we go back and it all goes wrong.  And I'm with you whatever you decide, you know that, right?"

 

"Ron …" Harry muttered a little desperately.

 

"I know, mate."  Ron hesitated, then dropped a kiss on his mouth.  "It's okay!  What do you want to do?"  He could read the answer in Harry's face, and nodded slightly.  "That's what I thought."

 

He spun the Time-Turner.

 

 **  
_~ finis ~_   
**


End file.
